Dreams of the Dark Lord
by hid6qoh
Summary: Sequel to 'Shadows of the Dark Lord'. Lord Voldemort's daughter returns to life and resolves to save her brother - murdered in a fight between the siblings - and change her murderous ways, whilst, unknown to Elizabeth Riddle, Lily Potter and the Ministry of Magic, a new danger is stirring in the shadows...
1. Preface

**Dreams of the Dark Lord  
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**This story is a sequel to 'Shadows of the Dark Lord', which can be found in My Stories. This story will assume knowledge of the prior story, and I highly recommend you read it - it's only about ninety thousand words long - but it's not absolutely necessary. Here's a summary of everything that's happened so far.**

**'Shadows' begins twenty years after the events of 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows'. Harry is having nightmares of Voldemort and all those that died during the Second Wizarding War. After investigating, he find a strange tower on an island in the sea. Inside the tower, Harry finds an eleven year-old boy with crimson eyes, the double of Lord Voldemort as a child.**

**Harry takes the boy - dubbed Tom Riddle - to a wizarding orphanage, and sends the child to Hogwarts to study. In Tom's class are Harry's daughter Lily and Hugo Weasley. Tom finds himself an object of fear and hatred wherever he goes, and for the next three years he suffers under the relentless hatred and mockery of the wizarding world - and in particular James Potter.**

**After his fourth year at Hogwarts, Tom is attacked in Diagon Alley and left for dead. Eighteen months later, he wakes, embittered and dreaming of a tower similar to the one Harry once dreamt of. These dreams soon consume Tom. Combined with the bullying he has suffered, and Lily's seeming abandonment of him, Tom snaps. He kills a student, tortures Lily and flees the school to find the tower. He is pursued by James Potter.**

**Tom and James reach the tower. Inside they find a sixteen year-old girl, Tom's sister Elizabeth. Together, Tom and Elizabeth murder James and leave the tower.**

**Five years later, they return to wage war on the wizarding world. After a prolonged campaign - and the murders of Rose Weasley, Hermione Granger and hundreds more - they seize control of the Ministry of Magic. However, their victory is hollow. Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood, Lily Potter and the students of Hogwarts are holed up in their impenetrable castle, and the wizarding world refuses to accept Tom and Elizabeth's leadership.**

**Disenchanted, Tom leaves his sister to find Lily. She captures him in Hogsmeade, takes him to Hogwarts and chains him up in the dungeons. The next day, Tom agrees to help Lily, and together they rescue Harry Potter, Ron Weasley and others from Azkaban. Upon their return, Tom is placed back in his cell. He is only freed when Lily realises that only Tom can defeat his sister. She releases him.**

**Tom finds his sister Elizabeth in the depths of the Department of Mysteries. He kills her, though he is fatally wounded in the fight. Tom levitates his sister through the veil in the Death Chamber, then travels to the grounds of Hogwarts. Within sight of the castle's front doors, he collapses, too weak to continue, and Tom seemingly dies. **

**His only companion in death is a slender black-and-white cat.**


	2. All the Time in the World

_All the Time in the World_

* * *

><p>When Elizabeth woke she was cold, and naked. Her back was pressed against a hard wooden floor, and an upraised splinter was digging painfully into her pale skin. Dark grey-stone walls pressed in close to every side of her. In one wall, set roughly between the stones was a crooked hearth choked with ash and dust. The other walls were featureless but for dusty long-neglected decorations - woven tapestries, hand-painted pictures, family photos - and three slender glass windows. The windows, hanging limply from their stained-white frames, had been cast open, and outside Elizabeth could see a beautiful blue sky. The distant sounds of birds chirping drifted in through the open windows.<p>

Inside, the room - some sort of farmhouse, Elizabeth thought - was small, cramped and dusty. It had obviously been abandoned for years. The kitchen table which dominated the room - a heavy eight-foot long slab of oak - was overturned and missing two legs. The straw-and-timber beds - one large, and two somewhat smaller - had been stripped of their stuffing and pushed up against the stone walls. The hand-crafted wooden armchairs clustered around the lifeless hearth had been chewed and torn by some large animal; Elizabeth thought she caught a whiff of werewolf in the air. The entire farmhouse reeked of Dark magic, and for some reason Elizabeth felt she had been here before.

Directly ahead of her, a thick wooden door stood half-ajar, gently swaying to and fro in a light pleasant breeze. Through the slender gap she could see rolling green hills, and gently-waving stalks of corn. Why was she here? Somehow, Elizabeth couldn't quite remember. Weakly, she climbed to her feet. Every muscle in her body ached, as if she had been running for days and days. In particular, the lower left side of her stomach crackled unpleasantly with pain, but when Elizabeth twisted to inspect her skin there was no sign of any wound.

Indeed, her whole body seemed suddenly unblemished. Gone was the four-inch-long scar across her chest that Elizabeth had received from a Tibetan warrior-hermit's sword, and the fist-sized burn on her lower back she had picked up at the hands of a vengeful Ethiopian shaman, and so too was the patch of ugly mottled purple bruising where her Chimaera had tried to take a chunk out of her. Elizabeth crossed the room to the nearest window, and peered out. The first thing she noticed in the grimy glass was her own reflection. She seemed - _different_, somehow, like wet sand wiped smooth by churning waves.

Beyond the window, idyllic farmland stretched to the horizon, a patchwork sea of green and brown and gold. The view was strangely familiar. A narrow mud-track wound through overgrown corn fields from the farmhouse's front door to a slender grey ribbon in the distance. A Muggle man was pottering along the road on a huge red tractor as Elizabeth watched. His machine was issuing billowing clouds of thick black smoke, and trotting along beside him was a huge shaggy-furred cow with golden bells dangling around its neck. He glanced towards her, the old Muggle farmer, towards the ruined farmhouse in its cornfield, and tipped his flat-felt cap in acknowledgement when he saw Elizabeth.

"Bună ziua acolo!" he called in some strange foreign language Elizabeth didn't know. "Pune niște haine pe!"

With a nimble grace borne from practice, Elizabeth reached for her wand to perform a Translating Charm - but, of course, the slender black stick she had taken from James Potter so long ago was nowhere to be found. Ducking away from the window in a sudden panic, she searched the ruined beds, the fire-scorched drawers, even beneath the overturned kitchen table, but her wand wasn't here. Perhaps it was for the best, she reflected, slumping to a seat against the rough-stone wall naked and baffled. Outside the farmhouse, the sounds of the tractor's labouring engine and the cow's _tinkling _bells were fading into the distance. If she'd had her wand, Father would have probably made her kill the Muggle man out of sheer spite. Father-

Father was _gone_, she suddenly realised. For the first time in Elizabeth's life, Lord Voldemort's anger and disappointment wasn't churning in the pit of Elizabeth's stomach. He wasn't telling her what to do, wasn't whispering incessantly in her ear, wasn't battling for control of Elizabeth's own body, wasn't forcing her away into a tiny dark corner of her own mind while he perpetrated his atrocities. For the first time in her life, she was free.

Soon, Elizabeth remembered the story of how she died. She remembered everything she had done, all the murders and scheming and violence she had committed; that she and her _brother _had committed. She remembered Tom finding her, freeing her, bringing her into his world when they were little more than teenagers. She remembered travelling the world together. With a sudden shudder, Elizabeth remembered this farmhouse, and the worst thing she and her brother ever did, and for a moment she could almost hear the children screaming.

She remembered conquering the Ministry of Magic, her brother by her side, and all the while Father was whispering in her ear. Whenever Elizabeth balked, or hesitated, or went against his wishes, the always-present burning in her heart would rise to a white-hot agony, and then she would have to do what Father wished. How often she had tried to confess all to Tom - that the reason they had travelled the world so long was that she was desperately seeking a way to bring Father back to life - yet she could never quite manage it. Father was too strong.

Elizabeth remembered Tom leaving. She remembered following, watching in the guise of a slender black-and-white cat, watching as Tom chose Lily Potter over her. She saw Tom's capture, his arrival at Hogwarts, he and Lily's triumphant return from Azkaban, and even their final farewell, as Tom left to find and kill his sister. A thousand times, Elizabeth had been tempted to take her brother back by force, but something - love, or doubt, or fear, or something else - had always stayed her hand. She remembered Tom coming to the Department of Mysteries beneath Lily Potter's Invisibility Cloak.

She remembered Tom killing her.

Slumped against the farmhouse's stony wall, tears suddenly budded in Elizabeth's scarlet eyes. At this very moment Tom was surely dying, a thousand miles away in the bowels of the Ministry of Magic, and she could do nothing to save him. She had no wand; she couldn't Apparate, or create a Portkey, or even fly. If she was her brother she could simply snap her fingers and conjure a Floo-fire from nowhere, but Elizabeth had never mastered that particular skill. Despairing, she rose to her feet and pulled the farmhouse door open, but she knew it was futile. She was in the middle of the Moldovan countryside; it could take _weeks _to get back to London. If only she had more time-

_Time_. Elizabeth almost laughed. She had just remembered; she had all the time in the world. In all the chaos of dying, she had entirely forgotten about the breakthrough she and old Unspeakable Croaker had made in their research down in the Department of Mysteries. Her pale-red lips now twisted in a beaming grin, she turned back towards the farmhouse's interior. The door slammed shut behind her, and Elizabeth crossed the dingy room towards the hearth in three quick strides. She knelt in the inch-thick layer of ash that spilled from the farmhouse's stony fireplace.

The rough stone floor grazed the skin of her knees, but Elizabeth barely noticed. She was too busy trawling through the ash. She had to rake deep in the filthy dust before she found it; a small ornate emerald, eerily-green, it seemed to sparkle with light even in the half-darkness of the farmhouse. Elizabeth had taken it from her tower, from the snake's-head carvings above the archway through which Tom had found her for the first time. It was her Horcrux, and Elizabeth clutched it gratefully in her hand now.

For a moment, as she rose to her feet and turned towards the farmhouse's opposite wall - lined with drawers and chests and cupboards - Elizabeth paused, puzzled, and she glanced down once more at the little green emerald in her hand. Only _she _had known about her Horcrux. Even Tom didn't know, and Elizabeth had no one else in the world but her brother. Besides, even if he _had_ known, it was Tom who killed her, and he was dying in England even now; he _couldn't _have brewed the potions and worked the spells that were necessary to restore Elizabeth's disembodied soul to the physical world. So who had brought her back?

She could ponder that mystery on the way, she supposed, striding to the farmhouse's tall chest-of-drawers. Elizabeth rummaged through the piles of charred fabrics, rats' droppings and bones in search of something wearable. All she found that wasn't child-sized or ruined by the flames was an old brown moth-eaten dress that fell to her knees; sighing, she slipped it on. Could her mysterious saviour not have left her a nice clean set of robes? It would have to do. Elizabeth found a pair of boots, too, but they all but collapsed in her hands, and she was forced to step outside the farmhouse barefoot. The mud _squelched _unpleasantly between her toes.

Turning, she spared one last glance for the farmhouse, then began her long walk towards London.

* * *

><p>A week later, Elizabeth was sitting on an uncomfortably-hard cast-iron bench in a Parisian train station, nose buried in a scavenged days-old copy of the <em>Daily Prophet, <em>when a little girl sat down next to her. "Hello," the little girl said breezily, sinking cross-legged onto the bench beside the tall pale woman who wore jeans, a black-grey long-sleeved t-shirt and impenetrable tinted sunglasses. "Are you going to London too?"

Elizabeth blinked uncertainly, though her brief puzzlement surely went unnoticed behind the thick-rimmed sunglasses she wore. Elizabeth had acquired them on her second day of travel in the Moldovan capital of Chisinau; she had grown tired of Muggles staring, pointing or even screaming when they saw the scarlet irises of her eyes. The farmfolk she had encountered on the road had simply refused to believe Elizabeth's hastily thought-up explanation - that her eye-colour was a genetic defect she was born with - and instead seemed to assume she was some sort of demon. In Chisinau she had found sunglasses, and clothes, and passage west that had brought her to Paris, but still Elizabeth had been infuriatingly unable to find any form of magical transportation.

Thus, here she was, waiting now for a train across the English Channel. "I - how did you know?" she asked the little girl. Elizabeth was suddenly paranoid. _Does she know me? She's probably a Muggle, but if she isn't, she might - my face was plastered on 'Wanted' posters all over the country. If she does know me... _

But the little girl just grinned. "I peeked at your newspaper," she said precociously. The girl was tiny, dainty, light-brown-haired, perhaps nine or ten years old. She wore a neat little purple dress, and knitted white socks pulled up to her knees, and a yellow bow in her hair. Sitting on the bench cross-legged, her deep-blue eyes were almost level with Elizabeth's. For a moment, as she gazed curiously at the girl, Elizabeth was forcibly reminded of the ghosts she had left behind at the farmhouse, and she shuddered. One of those children had been a little girl, she recalled dimly. "It's in English."

"Just because it's in English doesn't mean I'm going to London," Elizabeth pointed out. "I could have just came from London. I could be on holiday."

"True," said the little girl, that sly too-clever smile playing across her lips again. "But I _also _saw you looking up at the departure boards just now when the announcer lady mentioned London. And besides, you don't _look _like someone on holiday. You look like someone waiting to go home."

Elizabeth blinked again. "Are _you _going to London?" she finally asked, and the little girl nodded happily. "Remind me not to sit next to you. And don't _peek_," she chided as the little girl smiled again. Elizabeth snapped her stolen copy of the _Daily Prophet _shut before the little girl could notice that the pictures in Elizabeth's newspaper were moving. "It's rude."_  
><em>

"Oh." The little girl paused for half a breath to ponder this before continuing. "I'm Lucy. What's your name?"

Elizabeth glanced up at the departure boards, squinting through her sunglasses in the gloomy train-station twilight to make out the names and times listed there. Sighing, she saw it was still half an hour until her train, and reluctantly she turned back to the little girl, Lucy. "It's - er - Rose," she told the girl. "Rose Smith." Elizabeth had felt it best she travelled under a false name. The International Confederation of Wizards wanted her dead, after all, and without a wand Elizabeth could do nothing about her distinctive appearance except remain as surreptitious as possible. "Can I help you with something, Lucy?"

"Nope. I'm just bored," the little girl said. "My train leaves in half an hour. I think it's your train as well, Rose."

"Oh, joy," remarked Elizabeth. "Don't you have parents you could be annoying instead of me?"

"I don't have parents," Lucy said in a matter-of-fact tone. The little girl's even expression never wavered, though Elizabeth started in her seat. "I'm a stowaway."

Elizabeth stared at the girl for a long moment, and Lucy stared back. "I - I don't have parents either," she said eventually, breaking Lucy's deep-blue gaze on her and turning away. "I guess we have something in common."

"Yeah," Lucy echoed. "Hey, what's with your eyes?"

Behind her dark-tinted sunglasses, Elizabeth twitched, and her scarlet eyes narrowed slightly. "My - my eyes?"

Lucy tilted her head to the side slightly, her expression hungrily curious. "Well, they're - well, red."

"It's a disease," Elizabeth said curtly, turning away from the little girl towards the departure boards and the vast smoky hustle and bustle of Gare du Nord. "I was born with it. Hence the sunglasses - which," Elizabeth added pointedly, rubbing at the lenses of the glasses with her sleeve, "people are not supposed to be able to see through."

"They can't," Lucy assured her. "Only I can."

"You're a very strange little girl, you know that?" said Elizabeth, folding her arms across her chest and turning back towards Lucy. "Go on then. Tell me how only _you _can see my eyes."

"Well, I can't see them _now_," Lucy said with the exasperated air of having to explain oneself to a toddler. "It was a few seconds ago. I dunno how - I was just wondering what colour your eyes were, and then suddenly I could see them."

"Uh-huh," Elizabeth echoed doubtfully.

"Yeah," Lucy said defensively. "Stuff like that always happens to me."

"Really?" Elizabeth's curiosity was suddenly piqued by this strange little girl who could do impossible things. She glanced upwards at the departure board, and saw that it was still fifteen minutes before her train would leave. "Lucy, did you ever make anything happen? Anything you couldn't control, couldn't explain, when you were angry or scared?"

The little girl shrugged casually. "Sometimes, I guess."

"How old are you, Lucy?" Elizabeth prodded. "Nine?"

"Ten and a half."

Elizabeth leaned in close to the little girl, so close that Lucy could surely catch a flash of scarlet behind the dark material of her sunglasses, and lowered her voice to a whisper. "Lucy, are you going to Hogwarts?"

"Hogwhere?"

"It doesn't matter," she said quickly, though she felt it now, so obvious she didn't know how she had missed it; Lucy had magic in her. "Come on," Elizabeth said, rising to her feet and pulling a thick wad of Euro notes from her pocket. "If you're coming to London, I'll buy you a ticket."

Lucy's eyes widened at the sight of the wad of notes. "Where did you get all that money?"

"I stole it," Elizabeth said casually. "Look, our train's leaving soon. Come on."

"OK." As they headed off towards the ticket stand, Lucy took Elizabeth's hand. The girl's skin was soft, and warm. "Why are you going to London, Rose?" she asked.

"To save my brother," said Elizabeth.

"What's wrong with him?"

"He's dead."


	3. The Professor and the Pocket Watch

_The Professor and the Pocket Watch_

* * *

><p>"Where are we going?" Lucy asked.<p>

Outside the train's perspex windows the grimy industrial cityscape of London was flashing by in leaps and bounds. A thick grey smog hung over the endless city, a far cry from the sunshine and warmth of continental Europe that Elizabeth had grown almost accustomed to over the last few days. She could almost _feel _her suntan fading already. Elizabeth and Lucy sat opposite each other at a compact plastic table, virtually alone in the almost-empty train.

One half of the table they shared - Elizabeth's side - was tidy, neatly-ordered, the white plastic uniformity broken only by two discarded ticket-stubs and a folded copy of the _Daily Prophet_. Lucy's side of the table, on the other hand, looked as if a bomb had gone off in a chocolate bar factory. The hard white plastic was scattered with debris, unmistakable relics of a skinny hungry ten year-old girl taking far too many trips to the food trolley; discarded chocolate bar wrappers, crumpled cardboard sandwich containers, crushed empty cartons of fruit juice._  
><em>

It all emanated outwards in concentric circles from the little brown-haired girl who was gazing quizzically across the table at Elizabeth now. She had paid for all Lucy's food, of course; the girl didn't have two pennies to rub together. Elizabeth had even tried one of the chocolate bars at Lucy's urging - out of politeness rather than any hunger on her own part - but all food still tasted like cardboard to her. It always had. It was another thing she had Father to thank for, she suddenly bitterly supposed.

Outside the window rain was pelting down in great sweeping droves, a constant _drum-drum-drum _upon the window-glass. Further away to the south, thick black storm clouds were sweeping in overhead, and everywhere the evening sunlight was fading fast. For a moment the train's on-board lights flickered, and a sudden bolt of lightning far away in the distance illuminated Elizabeth and Lucy in an eerie-blue light. The little girl's eyes were beginning to droop tiredly, and she barely stifled a yawn now as she waited persistently for Elizabeth to answer her question.

"We're going to see an old acquaintance of mine," Elizabeth told the young girl. "He can help me."

"When-" Lucy quickly covered up another yawn- "when will we get there?"

Elizabeth smiled thinly. "For a stowaway, Lucy, you're awfully impatient to get where you're going." She leaned forward curiously, long pale fingers clasped before her on the tabletop. "You just ride around on trains all the time, is that what you do? How did you end up in Paris? What happened to your parents?"

Lucy's only response was to yawn again, and lower her chin childishly to the cold plastic tabletop. If Elizabeth had her wand she could have forced her way into the girl's mind and found her answers - but she didn't, so all Elizabeth did was half-smile down at the brown-haired girl. "Tired?" she prompted.

"No," Lucy said stubbornly. With a concerted effort she sat up again in her seat. Resting her cheek against the window's cool glass, she peered out into the storm. "What will your friend help you with? Is it your dead brother?"

"He's not dead," Elizabeth corrected, following the little girl's gaze as another forked bolt of lightning lit up the sky. "Well - if he is - he won't be for long. I'm going to save him."

Lucy looked skeptical - but mostly she looked tired. Her deepest-blue eyes flickered shut for a long moment, then snapped stubbornly open again. "Uh - uh-huh, Rose. Wake me - wake me up when we get there."

"I will," Elizabeth lied.

Elizabeth whiled away the time until they arrived at their destination by perusing the pages of her newly-acquired edition of the _Daily Prophet. _No more raking in bins for days-old copies for her, as she had had to do far too much during the last week; this was today's issue, swiped from the stall of a particularly short-sighted newspaper vendor, and segments of it were _very _interesting to Elizabeth. The front-page headline was _RIDDLE HUNT GOES ON. _

This was accompanied by two black-and-white photos. One depicted the blood-soaked crime scene Elizabeth and her brother had left in the depths of the Ministry of Magic after their fight. Ministry officials were constantly shifting in and out of shot in their efforts to better examine the crime scene. The other picture depicted Tom's very own Lily Potter, smiling hesitantly for what looked very much like a Ministry mugshot.

_Newly-appointed Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement Lily Potter, _the article read, _claims there is nothing to fear despite the Ministry's ongoing failure to locate Tom and Elizabeth Riddle - alive or otherwise. "We may never know what really happened," Potter said at a press conference yesterday. "Are Tom and Elizabeth alive? Look at the mess they left in the Department of Mysteries. __We found the Invisibility Cloak I lent Tom at the scene, as well as __my brother's old wand [ED: see pages 5-6 for an exclusive report on the funerals of James Potter and Hermione Granger]._

_"You look at all that blood," Potter continued, "and you think surely they must be dead - but we've underestimated the Riddles before. We won't ever again. Some of Tom's old enchantments are still holding, and as you know, when the wizard dies, his enchantments die with him. To be honest, I don't know whether they're alive. We can only keep looking. I'm sure in my heart, though, that we won't have any more problems with the Riddles."_

"They never found his body," Elizabeth whispered to herself. The words sent an electric shiver down her spine.

When the train finally ground to a halt in the little Muggle village of Budleigh Babberton, Elizabeth was as alert and highly-strung as ever. She never slept, _had _never slept. Lucy, on the other hand, was out for the count. Thankfully for Elizabeth the little brown-haired girl was as light as a feather, and she carried the girl off the train with ease. As they stepped out onto the quaint Victorian-era platform (and out into the still-pouring rain) the train's doors _hissed _shut behind her, and slowly it _chuffed_ away round the bend and away into the darkness.

Lucy's deep-blue eyes flitted open for a moment, but Elizabeth murmured a reassuring word and ran a pale cold hand through the young girl's fine silky hair, and her eyes soon squeezed shut again. With Lucy cradled in her arms Elizabeth hurried out of the train station and across the street into the village proper. She soon found herself almost running as the rain and the winds chilled her to her bones, and Elizabeth was grateful when she dove into the lobby of the first hotel she found and found it was dry and warm inside.

She left the sleeping Lucy tucked up safe and warm in a hotel bedroom. _I've gone out to find my friend,_ she scribbled hastily on a scrap piece of Muggle paper. Elizabeth's handwriting had always been atrocious. _If I don't come back he'll look after you. P.S. the number for room service is 445. There's money in the top bedside drawer. _Elizabeth hesitated a moment, then put pen to paper once more. _Love, Rose. _She was growing strangely fond of the little stowaway girl - and more than that, she wanted to know just _what _a little ten year-old girl with magical abilities was doing alone in a Parisian train station.

Elizabeth placed the note delicately on Lucy's bedside table, then headed back out into the rain to find Professor Croaker.

It was eight o'clock on a midsummer Monday evening, and Budleigh Babberton was near enough deserted. The only ones foolish enough to be out in this miserable weather were Elizabeth, a few scowling teenagers and one elderly homeless man who took one glance at the tall pale woman approaching down the street and fled in the opposite direction. Perhaps he had the right idea, Elizabeth thought, teeth chattering; the rain was utterly horrendous, and the wind had an icy bite to it tonight.

She was soon soaked through and shivering violently. As she picked a path through the village's darkened meandering streets, Elizabeth dearly wished she had stopped to find some more appropriate clothes before returning to Britain. She had forgotten how _cold _it was here. Her drenched jeans felt so heavy it was as if she were walking on some strange high-gravity planet. Her long-sleeved t-shirt, once black and grey, was now rendered almost transparent by the ceaseless rain. That, and the thick-rimmed sunglasses she still wore all conspired to make Elizabeth feel utterly ridiculous.

Finally, as she wiped the lenses of her sunglasses clear of rainwater for the thousandth time, she saw it; Croaker's house lay just across the street. The old Unspeakable's home was modest and old-fashioned, yet homely and somehow warm for all that. Elizabeth crossed the road towards it, and paused at the foot of the old man's garden path. Croaker's curtains were open, and a warm yellow lamp shone brightly in the living room window.

Inside was a cosy sitting-room. Elizabeth could see two cushy leather armchairs and a patchwork sofa placed haphazardly around a roaring fire, and a shimmer of reflected dancing lights against the sitting-room's back wall that she suspected was cast by a Muggle television. The farther away of the two armchairs faced the window; it was occupied by old Professor Croaker. Short and stick-thin, his hair had receded after decades of service to the Ministry to a small white tuft on the top of his bald head. He wore the long white lab-coat he always seemed to, and the gleaming silver insignia of the Department of Mysteries pinned upon his chest.

His face was craggy, yet kindly and wise, and his eyes turned now to something unseen through the kitchen door over his shoulder. A moment later a woman that was surely his wife stepped into view, plump and grey-haired, clutching a tray laden with two china teacups and a row of small round chocolate biscuits. Croaker smiled. With a shaky hand and a murmured word of thanks he took his cup of tea into his lap - and then he spied Elizabeth watching through the window.

He recognised her instantly, she knew. Elizabeth could tell by the way his fingers tightened around the base of his teacup, the way his hand shook, sending drops of milky-brown tea splashing onto the carpet, the way he reached with slightly-trembling fingers for his thick-rimmed spectacles. Elizabeth raised a long pale finger to her lips as he gaped on, then crooked it towards herself in a gesture Croaker instantly understood. For a moment the old man's mouth moved wordlessly, and he seemed at a loss as to what to do - but swiftly he regained control of himself.

His wife's smile had faded slightly. Leaning forward from her own armchair she touched Croaker's arm uncertainly, but the old man quickly assured her he was alright. His eyes never left Elizabeth. Slowly, he slipped his shoes on, then rose to his feet to cross his sitting-room towards the hallway. For a few moments he stepped out of Elizabeth's sight - but then the front door swung open, and Croaker stepped out into the downpour. Looking rather like a drowned white rat, he strode across his pristinely-maintained garden towards her.

"Hello, Croak-" Elizabeth began - but the old man simply seized her arm with surprising strength and turned on the spot, turning into the squeezing tube of Apparition. One second they spun, two seconds, three; and then Elizabeth's feet landed on cold black stone. Croaker had taken her to a place she knew only too well. She had spent most of the last six months here, staring into the abyssal depths of that damned veil. This was the room where she had died. Elizabeth felt a little shiver run down her spine as she saw the very spot; right there by the edge of the pit, six feet away from the tall stone archway and the veil was where she had breathed her last. For a moment, she wondered what Tom had done with her body.

"What was that for?" she demanded angrily, tossing her sunglasses aside to smash upon the stone floor as she spun back towards Croaker. The old white-haired Unspeakable had taken a seat atop the pit wall, his face a grimly resigned mask as he contemplated the onrushing Elizabeth. "I'm not here to kill you, if that's what you're worried about - nor your wife. I'm not here for that."

"You're alive," Croaker simply remarked. Droplets of water dripped steadily from the professor's long crooked nose to splash eerily loudly on the stone floor below. "I wish I could say I was surprised, Elizabeth. Was it a Horcrux?"

Elizabeth ignored the old man's calmly accurate questioning. "I need your help, Croaker," she said impatiently. Her drenched hair was clinging to the pale skin of her face and neck, and she brushed it annoyedly out of her scarlet eyes now. "I need a wand."

"Take mine, then." Croaker slipped his hand into an inner pocket of his lab-coat to draw his wand and toss it at Elizabeth's feet. "Leave me out of whatever you're planning."

"I don't want _your _wand," she snapped disdainfully. "I want _my _wand, Croaker. But," she said, turning away to stride anxiously towards the fluttering veil, "I read in the _Daily Prophet _that they buried my wand with James Potter in some place called Godric's Hollow, so I suppose that's out of the question."

Behind her back Croaker released a harsh little laugh. "You won't stoop to grave-robbing, Elizabeth?"

Father had broken into Albus Dumbledore's grave once, Elizabeth knew. He had violated his own father's tomb to restore himself to life. Elizabeth wasn't sure who she was, but she wasn't _him. _"I just need your help to find a new wand," she continued relentlessly, "and then you'll never see me again. You can live your life drinking tea and watching television on Monday evenings in peace. _All _I need, Croaker, is for you to take me to Diagon Alley. To Ollivanders. You can do that, right?"

Behind thick-rimmed spectacles spattered with rainwater, Croaker's eyes were a pale inscrutable milky-blue. "Why do you need me?" he finally asked.

"I need _my _wand," she explained impatiently. "Not someone else's, and I don't know enough about wandlore to find it myself. Croaker, I need to _buy _a wand from Ollivanders."

"Again, why do you need me?"

"How many adults buy wands, Croaker?" she asked. "Not many, I'll bet. A week ago two of the most infamous mass murderers in history went missing - _without their wands. _You think people won't be on the lookout? You think the Ministry won't be watching Ollivanders? No, Croaker, I need your help." Elizabeth fingered the slender silver hip-flask stowed in the back pocket of her jeans, and the long brown hair that was dissolving in the contents of the hip-flask even now. "I need you to be my grandfather."

Croaker grasped her plan quick enough. "We'll have to wait until tomorrow," he said once Elizabeth had finished explaining. "Ollivanders will be closed by this time."

"No, we won't."

They both stood in silence for a moment, while the black veil fluttered and the dead whispered, as the meaning of Elizabeth's statement sank in. When Croaker finally spoke, his voice was an aghast whisper. "You can't mean to-"

"I do," she interrupted icily, stabbing a pale finger at Croaker's knee-length lab-coat. "I know you won't have told anyone, Croaker. You won't have trusted anyone else to keep it safe. I know you have it. It's probably in your pocket right now."

Croaker still stared, horrified. "Elizabeth, I don't think it's wise-"

"I do," she repeated in a tone that made it clear the matter was settled. "Give it to me."

Slowly, reluctantly, the old man nodded. With faintly-trembling hands he reached into his lab-coat and pulled a small silver device from a golden chain around his neck. "It's never been tested, you know," he said, snapping the chain with one good tug and tossing the device across the pit to Elizabeth. Delicately, she caught it. "It'll probably kill you."

"Kill us," she whispered, but she was only half-listening to the old Unspeakable. All her attention was fixated on the little metallic device she held cradled in her hands. It was surprisingly heavy, small and intricate and beautiful, almost overflowing with cogs and gears and little silver things whose purpose mystified Elizabeth; but she knew what the device was well enough. Together she and Croaker had created it. "You finished it," she murmured wondrously, tracing a pale fingertip across the device's exposed inner workings. It was small, smooth and circular, rather like an old-fashioned pocket-watch - but this device had only one dial.

"It was already virtually finished," Croaker said. He was gazing fearfully across the pit at Elizabeth - but there was a hint of scientific curiosity in those milky-blue eyes, and anticipation too. "Your work was extraordinary. I just filled in the gaps."

Barely listening, Elizabeth raised the device up to eye-level, then handed it back to the old professor. "Six turns should do it, I think," she said, turning away and slipping the slender hip-flask from her back pocket. As Croaker took the device in reluctant hands she snapped the hip-flask's lid open and took a long deep sip of the murky blue substance. Her face began to bubble and churn, and her bones began to shrink and twist. In a matter of seconds it was over. When she turned back to Croaker, she did so with the face of a ten year-old girl.

"Your clothes are too big," Croaker pointed out.

Croaker's discarded wand lay at Elizabeth's feet. She picked it up and twirled it above her head, and with a soft _pop _her sodden oversized clothes dried and shrunk to an appropriate size. Elizabeth stepped forward, handed the old man's wand back to him, then took Croaker's hand. "Well, shall we?" she asked with Lucy's sweet voice.

Croaker sent the Time-Turner spinning.


	4. 173 Turns Should Do It

_One Hundred and Seventy Three Turns Should Do It_

* * *

><p>"Just remember," Elizabeth hissed out of the corner of her mouth, "you're my grandfather."<p>

"What was that?" Croaker whispered back - too loudly. It was a beautiful late-August afternoon, and the old white-haired Unspeakable and the little brown-haired girl were walking down a sun-soaked Diagon Alley hand in hand. The violent storms that would sweep into London from the Atlantic late that night were now no more than a breath of ice on the wind and a puff of dark clouds on the horizon. "I can't hear you down there."

Elizabeth scowled up at him. "I said, _Grandad,_" she snapped impatiently, "let's go get my wand now!" She pointed with a short stubby finger through the crowds, towards a narrow shop painted entirely in a peeling and faded black. In its nearest window a wand was placed delicately upon a purple velvet cushion. "There's Ollivanders, come on."

"There's a queue," Croaker said wearily as he steered Elizabeth towards the tall and ancient wand-shop. "We'll have to wait."

She scowled again - a dark dirty look that must have looked very strange on Lucy's precocious happy face - as the crowds shifted for a moment and Croaker was proved right; the first of September was nearly here, of course, and the queue of first-years-to-be eagerly waiting to purchase their first wands snaked out the door of Ollivanders and thirty feet down the street. A moment later the crowds shifted and the queue disappeared from sight, and Elizabeth's expression darkened ever further.

She couldn't see a bloody thing from down here. Elizabeth had never been a child before, and she wasn't particularly enjoying the experience so far. Tottering around on Lucy's tiny legs, speaking in a ridiculously high-pitched whine, people talking to her like she was an idiot (or worse, offering her chocolate); all in all, it was almost as embarrassing as wearing those horrendous sunglasses had been. _It won't be like this for long, _she resolved privately. _Once I've got my wand things will be different. I'll be able to do whatever I want._

Already, only a week or so after the disappearance of the Riddles, the wizarding world seemed to have returned entirely to normal. It was as if all the unrest of the past year or so had never even happened. The new term at Hogwarts was coming soon, she knew, and excited students were everywhere in Diagon Alley today. For six months the children had been shut up in their ancient castle, unable to step outside the protective boundaries of Hogwarts for fear of Tom or Elizabeth - and unsure whether their friends or family were even alive. Presumably after last week's events in the Department of Mysteries the students had been allowed to return home to their families, but already their studies were calling.

A lot of things had changed very quickly in the last week. Elizabeth had read in the _Daily Prophet _- somehow that old rag was still going - that Gabrielle Delacour and the other representatives of the International Confederation of Wizards had returned to their headquarters in Switzerland. Annoyingly, the article had made no mention of where Elizabeth's pet Chimaera might be. Closer to home, Lily Potter was the new Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement at the Ministry of Magic, and a woman named Melinda Bobbin had been appointed Minister for Magic.

Elizabeth had vague memories of the woman from she and Tom's long scouting of the Ministry. Bobbin had been Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation then, and was by all accounts an officious, bureaucratic and uninteresting woman. In short, not worth killing.

As she and Croaker took a place at the back of the long and winding Ollivanders queue, Elizabeth released a loud impatient sigh and strained on her tiptoes to peer into the shop's gloomy interior. Ollivanders was packed to bursting with excited eleven year-olds, all waiting patiently to be provided with their first wands. Elizabeth took a deep breath and told herself to relax. _You have all the time in the world, _she reminded herself. _What's another few minutes?_

"Do you really believe you can save him?" Croaker asked suddenly. Curious, Elizabeth glanced up at the short old man in the white Ministry lab-coat. She had to squint against the sunshine. "I saw the mess you two made in the Death Chamber," he explained. "It was quite the sight. You can go back in time as far as you want, Elizabeth, but you cannot change the past. Whatever happened happened. Terrible things happen to wizards and witches who meddle with time - particularly for things as frivolous as a shopping trip."

"I know all that," she said dismissively. "I've got it all worked out. They haven't found Tom's body, right? That's _because _I save him."

Croaker still looked doubtful. His pale milky-blue eyes blinked slowly as he gazed down at her. "If that is true, where might you and your brother be now? It's been a week since your - your death. The Time-Turner only goes one way, you know."

"In hiding, I assume."

She said no more, and soon Croaker turned away and struck up a conversation with the parents of the child ahead of Elizabeth in the queue. The child in question - red-haired, freckled, no doubt yet another Weasley - tried to engage Elizabeth in conversation several times, but each time she forestalled the red-haired girl's attempts with a cold withering gaze and a turned cheek. Elizabeth was in no mood for pretending to be a ten year-old girl any longer - and in any greater detail - than she had to. She had had quite enough of all that all that time she was pretending to be a cat.

An interminable amount of time later, Elizabeth's turn came, and she stepped forward impatiently, Croaker's hand firmly grasped in her own. The proprietor of Ollivanders - a man in his fifties or sixties, tall, gaunt and bony, face sunken into deep cavernous wrinkles, grey hair thinning and wispy - glanced first at her, then expectantly at Croaker. His eyes were grey and cold. "My - er - granddaughter would like her first wand," Croaker said hesitantly.

"Your granddaughter?" The old wandmaster - Ollivander, Elizabeth supposed - gazed curiously across the shop-counter at her for what felt an uncomfortably long while. His eyes seemed to bore right through her skin, to penetrate her very soul. "Yes, I - I see the resemblance," he finally murmured.

Ollivander reached into his robes. He pulled out an enchanted measuring-tape which twitched and turned and coiled around the grey-haired man's wrist with a mind of its own. Moving out from behind his desk Ollivander draped the tape around Elizabeth's tiny shoulders - and almost immediately, with a noise that sounded strangely like a fearful hiss, the measuring-tape fled back into Ollivander's wrinkled hands.

His grey eyes met Elizabeth's then, and narrowed almost imperceptibly. Fearing the worst - that somehow he _knew _- Elizabeth tensed to flee; but for some reason, Ollivander didn't attack the helpless woman trapped in a ten year-old's body or run bawling and screaming for the Aurors. He didn't even reach for his own wand, set aside on the shop-counter only a foot or two away. "Curious..." the old man murmured to himself, before turning abruptly and striding away into the back-rooms of his shop.

As he went, Elizabeth and Croaker shared a nervous look. Elizabeth's little heart was thumping furiously. A few moments later Ollivander returned, a slender black wand-case clasped in his age-spotted hands. Delicately he opened it and placed it on the shop-counter before Elizabeth.

"Phoenix feather," he whispered in a voice so low that even Croaker - still hovering, hand on Elizabeth's shoulder, dutifully playing the part of the doting grandfather - had to strain to hear. "Ash. Eleven inches. Pliant." His cold grey eyes flitted to Croaker. "I'm sure your granddaughter will do great things with this wand."

Afterwards, Elizabeth stepped out into the sunshine. Her new wand felt right in her hand in a way that - somehow - James Potter's walnut stick never quite had. A new wand. A new start. She was ready, she decided.

"Thank you, Croaker," she said, glancing over her shoulder as the tall old man squeezed through the doorway of Ollivanders towards her. "You won't ever see me again." _Not with this face, anyway_, she silently added. _Nor my old one. _

Croaker's mouth moved wordlessly for a long moment. "You - you're still going to try?" he asked incredulously, wiping a hand across his wrinkled brow. "He's _dead, _Elizabeth. It's impossible."

"They never found his body," she repeated stubbornly with the stolen voice of a little girl. "That means I can change things. Maybe it means I already have." She held out a small warm hand towards Croaker and beckoned him closer. "I _know _I can save him. Give me the Time-Turner."

Reluctantly, he handed the silver device to Elizabeth. "You'll need one hundred and seventy-three turns," Croaker told her. "I worked it out while you were trying out wands."

Elizabeth smiled, and squeezed the old Unspeakable's hand in thanks. She half-turned away then - but just as quickly turned back. She had just remembered something important. "One last thing," she said. "Tonight there will be a ten year-old girl in room twenty-four of the Stag's Head hotel in Budleigh Babberton. If she's still there by midnight, I'm not coming back for her. Will you take care of her, Croaker?"

Croaker nodded stiffly. Both he and Elizabeth lingered in awkward silence for a moment, while all around the crowds passed on oblivious. "Well, aren't you going to go?" Elizabeth said finally.

Croaker smiled thinly. "The minute I turn away you'll wipe my memory. I'm not stupid, Elizabeth."

_Drat. _Elizabeth forced a sweet smile. "Wouldn't you rather forget all this ever happened? Wouldn't you sleep easier at night?"

"I'll sleep easier at night knowing the Time-Turner is in safe hands."

Sighing, Elizabeth turned away. Far away down the street the gates of Gringotts were open for business, and the white-marble facade gleamed in the brilliant sunshine. She'd have to open an account there now, she supposed. "As soon as I've saved Tom and returned to the present I'll return the Time-Turner to you for safe keeping," she said. "Sound fair?"

"I-"

"Check your pockets," she said. "I bet it's already there."

Croaker patted his pockets. "Nope."

"Really?" Elizabeth blinked, momentarily puzzled. "Well, perhaps I changed my mind."

"Elizabeth-"

"_Obliviate_!" she whispered under her breath. Her wand-tip, protruding an inch from the end of her sleeve, was pointed square at Croaker's chest. The old man glanced around surprisedly, blinked once, twice, wiped at his thick-rimmed spectacles with a sleeve of his lab-coat, then turned and disappeared into thin air. Elizabeth smiled thinly as he went. Selective Memory Charms were tricky bits of magic, but she felt sure she had gotten it right.

Croaker would forget all about her. He would forget that the Time-Turner had ever existed. He would remember his promise concerning Lucy, no more, and he wouldn't even recall who he had made the promise to. Elizabeth was dead once more. With a happy skip in her step, she hastened to the nearest deserted alleyway, turned on the spot and disappeared into thin air with a loud _pop._

When she emerged from the claustrophobia of Apparition she was Elizabeth once more, as pale and thin as old dry bones. Her hair fell messily down her back, her features were haughty and elegant, and she wore loose flowing black robes that fluttered wispily in a slight draught. Her knee-high black boots _clicked _softly on the black stone floor when she moved. Elizabeth was back once more in the room Croaker had called the Death Chamber, in the lowermost depths of the Ministry of Magic. She stood on the room's uppermost ring of stairs, high above the wide deep pit that was sunken into the chamber's floor. In the pit was a tall stone archway, and beneath the archway a shimmering black veil. But for the strange whispers from beyond the veil, the chamber was utterly silent and still.

Taking the little silver Time-Turner in hand, Elizabeth began to turn it between long pale fingers. Once. Twice. A hundred times. A hundred and fifty. She never lost count, and her eyes never left the fluttering veil below her. Finally, after one hundred and seventy two rotations she twiddled the device's dial for the last time. Before her eyes the world shimmered and changed. Shadows flowed around her like a great black river. Little blurs of light came, then went, then came again. The world was spinning, spinning, and Elizabeth felt as if she were about to be sick - but then it stopped.

The air stank of blood and death. Far below Elizabeth echoed the sounds of distant shuffling footsteps from the blood-soaked pit floor - and the hoarse ragged breathing of a dying man. She took a half-step backwards, so her face was shrouded in shadow, and watched on in silence as a tall dark figure levitated a pale corpse through the veil. Elizabeth's heart was fluttering violently in her chest. Tears rose to her scarlet eyes, but she choked them back with a flick of her wand.

She had to wait. It was too early to reveal herself, however much she wished to call out to her brother. Only when Tom was about to die could she save him. Then, and only then, she was sure, would he take her back.

Elizabeth watched as tall green flames burst into life below her. She watched as Tom dropped her wand to the floor, watched as he trod on his discarded Invisibility Cloak and almost slipped, watched as he stumbled and lurched into the fire and disappeared, blood oozing sluggishly from three fist-sized holes in his chest. They were holes she had left. Holes she told herself Father had _made _her leave, though in honesty she wasn't quite sure. Things had been truly desperate those last few days.

With Tom a captive of Lily Potter, Elizabeth had been alone with her thoughts - alone with Father. Half the time she hadn't even known what she was doing. She followed Tom's every movement, but wasn't sure if she wished to free him or kill him. The rare moments of lucidity when Elizabeth woke with Muggle blood on her hands only made things worse.

She was no longer able to hold her tears back, and hurriedly Elizabeth moved down the steps towards Tom's flames. Her brother had disappeared, but the flames would take her wherever he had went. As long as she reached them in time - but on that very thought, as Elizabeth leapt down into the pit she stumbled and fell flat on her face. When she looked up the emerald-green flames winked out. Elizabeth lay in a pool of her own blood - whether from Tom's earlier stabbing or her fall she couldn't say. She didn't feel too badly damaged though, so she climbed to her feet and steadied herself on the archway's rough stone.

For a moment - robes soaked through with liberal quantities of her own blood - Elizabeth was stumped. Where would Tom go? More specifically, where would he go to die? She only had time to guess once - though, she supposed, she had the Time-Turner as a last resort. With a deep breath, Elizabeth turned on the spot and vanished into thin air.

When she opened her eyes, she stood before the tall iron gates of Hogwarts. Far in the distance the colossal castle's lights and lanterns were burning up the night sky. Though her heart was thumping nervously, Elizabeth wasted no time in forcing the wizarding school's gates open with a thunderous blast of her wand. This was no time for creeping around in pipes, after all. She dashed inside between the smoking lumps of molten metal - repairing them behind her with a lazy flick of her wand - and headed straight up the muddy avenue towards the castle. Was she too late?

In the darkness on the Hogwarts front lawn, she came to Tom Riddle as he died. Elizabeth was disguised as a slender black-and-white cat with a stubby tail. She crept under her brother's arm and nuzzled in by his side. Tom seemed almost delirious. His pale skin was burning. His eyes were glittering with starlight and strange flashing images. He was muttering frantically to himself over and over again. With her left paw pressed against his wrist Elizabeth could feel his pulse; it was frighteningly weak.

"Build a better world, Lily," Tom whispered hoarsely, scarlet eyes blinking shut, and Elizabeth knew it was time.

She slunk out from beneath her brother's arm and changed to her more accustomed two-legged form in a blink. Kneeling by Tom's side she slipped her phoenix-feather wand from within her robes and began to wave it back and forth across his chest. She worked her magic on Tom for quite some time, murmuring, muttering, chanting long strings of healing spells she half-remembered from her travels across the world, urging and pleading with her brother's blood and life to return to his body.

It was quite a curse she had hit him with, but slowly Tom's wounds knitted together. His sprained ankle snapped softly back into place. He wasn't bleeding any more, but the three fresh fist-sized scars on his chest remained. Relics of Dark magic, they would be with Tom forever now - _or for another few hours at least, _Elizabeth thought with a slight smile, patting the slender vials of fluid she had hidden beneath her cloak. Beneath Tom's too-pale skin, arteries and veins began to twitch and pulse with blood again. Elizabeth placed a hand on his bare chest, and felt a flicker of strength return to his heartbeat.

Finally, with a hacking cough and a spray of spittle, Tom awoke. He took a huge panting, gasping breath, and looked around frantically in a dazed panic - and then he saw his sister kneeling beside him on the grassy ground, a happy beaming smile playing across her pale-red lips, and his scarlet eyes widened in shock. "El - _Elizabeth?" _he murmured incredulously. His voice was a raspy whisper. "Am I - am I dead?"

In answer she flung her arms around her brother and hugged him warmly. "No," she whispered into his ear, suddenly grinning like a maniac, "you're not dead. I saved you."

"You - _but _- you..." Tom sounded so utterly baffled Elizabeth laughed out loud. "I _killed _you."

"You tried," she corrected him, easing Tom backwards to the grassy ground to fix him with a thin smile. "I won't hold it against you, Tom. You did admirably well. If I hadn't created a Horcrux we'd both be dead right now - and wouldn't that be a boring world?"

Tom seemed in a state of shock. Far off in the distance to Elizabeth's right, the castle's tall front doors stood wide open. Warm yellow light was streaming out into the night, and with a sudden unpleasant jolt Elizabeth realised a familiar red-haired shadow had just stepped into the doorway. The figure seemed to be peering out into the darkness towards the vicinity of Tom and Elizabeth. Both siblings watched in silence for a few moments - Tom's eyes widened in a strange mixture of shock and horror, Elizabeth's narrowed in sudden tension - as the shadow stood there. Lily surely couldn't see them, but they could see _her _well enough.

Suddenly, Tom tried to lurch to his feet. "No!" Elizabeth hissed, raising her arms to stop him - but there was no need. Tom barely got off the ground before he fell back to the grass with a muffled cry of pain. Elizabeth stooped to offer him a hand up - but when he took it, she dug into his still-feverish skin with overlong fingernails, and he winced. With her other hand she snapped her brother's gaze back towards her urgently.

"If you try to go back now, Tom, they will _kill _you," she said bluntly. "Lily wants you dead. They _all _want you dead. I'm - I'm all you've got."

Sprawled on his back in the grass, Tom glanced away to his left. In the castle's doorway, the red-haired shadow shrugged, turned and went back inside. "You're not enough, Elizabeth."

"Oh, stop being such a drama queen," she snapped irritably, helping Tom to his feet with a cold pale hand. Still shaken and feeble he almost crumpled to the ground again, and Elizabeth had to hold her brother up with a firm arm around his waist. "If you're worried about living the rest of your life in some cave, don't be. I have a plan."

Tom contorted in Elizabeth's embrace to meet her scarlet eyes. "A - a plan?"

"Come with me," she promised, "and you just might see Lily as a free man again."

He blinked uncertainly. After a few seconds he stepped away from Elizabeth's side to take an uncertain wobbling step towards the darkened castle. "I killed you for a reason, Elizabeth," he said, back turned to his sister. "All those things you did - _we _did...this doesn't change anything."

"But _I've _changed!" she exclaimed beseechingly, striding after Tom. "Father's _gone, _Tom! Voldemort was inside me for all these years, but now-"

"I'm going," he said stubbornly, taking yet another step towards Hogwarts. "Have a good life, Elizabeth - _aargh_!"

He dived aside as Elizabeth sent a Stunner zinging past his ear. "You're coming with me, Tom," Elizabeth said coolly, wand raised as she stalked across the grass towards him. "It's not really a choice."

He stared up at her for a long moment, scarlet eyes wide and wild - but then slowly he nodded, and scrabbled to his feet. Tom raised a hand - his skin was eerily pale, almost luminous in the moonlight - and snapped his fingers. Behind her, Elizabeth felt the familiar cool heat of one of Tom's Floo-fires spark into life. "I'll hear your_ plan_," he said, rising to stand face to face with his sister. The fire's green flames were dancing in the irises of his eyes. "You can start by telling me how in the name of Merlin you're alive. After that, I'm coming back here to face whatever it is they're going to do to me."

"_Why_?"

"We _deserve_ to be dead, Elizabeth."

Elizabeth just grinned. "Oh, I'm sure you'll come around. Shall we go, then? The longer we stay here the more we risk your dear Lily realising that we're still alive." Without waiting for confirmation she took Tom's hand in her own and steered him towards the ten-foot-tall flames. "Sometime you'll have to teach me how to conjure those," she added affectionately.

Despite himself Tom grinned. "If you can convince me that a pair of murderers like us deserve a happy ending, I'll teach you everything I know."

"Deal."

Together they stepped into the flames.


	5. The Riddles

_The Riddles_

* * *

><p>They sat in a brightly-lit booth on opposite sides of a slender white plastic table, tucked away in the corner of a deserted all-night cafe in the heart of London. It was three in the morning. Except for one prowling blonde-haired waitress, Elizabeth and her brother were the only people in the place. The cafe's red faux-leather seats were hard and uncomfortable, and every time Elizabeth shifted position the material <em>squeaked <em>loudly beneath her. Every so often the waitress would pass their table and briefly interrupt a series of seemingly never-ending yawns to enquire if they needed anything, but other than that she and Tom were alone.

Tom sat across the table from his sister, slouched haphazardly against the cool glass of the window. An untouched cup of coffee lay forgotten on the table before him. Despite Elizabeth's healing prowess, he still looked a mess. She felt a pang of sympathy now as she gazed at her bruised and broken brother. His hair fell almost to his shoulders in greasy blood-soaked clumps. His robes were tattered and filthy, stained everywhere with mud and blood and god-knew-what else. His face was frighteningly gaunt, and weeks unshaven. His eyes, temporarily enchanted just as Elizabeth's own were, were a distant haunted pale blue. Elizabeth was surprised the waitress had even allowed him into the cafe.

Tom had been staring out the window for some time when suddenly he spoke. "Time to explain, then," he said hoarsely, pale blue eyes flitting momentarily away from the streets of London to his sister's concerned face. "I killed you. I levitated your body through that veil. How did you survive?"

"I told you," she said patiently. "I had a Horcrux."

"What the bloody hell is a Horcrux?"

Elizabeth blinked. Over Tom's shoulder, the blonde-haired waitress was scrubbing stubbornly at a particularly-resistant floor-stain. "You don't know?"

"No," Tom snapped irritably. His eyes returned to the window as a late-night bus rumbled along Tottenham Court Road. Across the street in the orange light of a lamppost a shadowy figure was leaning idly against a fence. "I'm not _like _you, Elizabeth. I don't have - don't have Lord Voldemort living inside my head!"

"I-"

"That's how it works, right?" he interrupted harshly. "He's in _there_-" Tom stabbed a long pale finger across the table towards her forehead and touched her cold skin- "in there with all his Horcruxes and curses and Inferi and every other sick thing you never bothered to tell me about, isn't he? You know a hundred times more about the Dark Arts than I _ever _will, Elizabeth, so no, I don't know what a bloody Horcrux is."

The sheer bitterness of his tone rather stung Elizabeth. Her lips moved wordlessly for a long moment before she spoke. "He's not in there anymore," she said finally in a small childish voice. "He's gone. I _saved _you. Why are you angry?"

Tom's eyes flitted back to her, lingered a moment as he saw just how distressed his sister was, widened uncomfortably - then hurried away again to the window. When finally he turned back to her he looked rather ashamed. "I - I'm sorry," he said quietly. "It's just - we should be _dead, _Elizabeth. This isn't the way it was supposed to be."

"_This _is a second chance," she corrected him stubbornly. "We can make up for all those things we did, Tom. We can do-" _whatever we want, _she thought, but Elizabeth knew that wasn't what Tom wanted to hear- "we can do something _good_. Something brilliant."

Tom looked skeptical - but obviously his curiosity as to how Elizabeth had survived won over his morose gloominess, and finally he nodded acquiescently. "Anyway," he said, "I'm sorry I talked about - about _him. _Go on, tell me, what's a Horcrux?"

And so she told him. Reaching into her robes Elizabeth held up the little green emerald she had kept safe ever since leaving the farmhouse and placed it gently on the tabletop. Tom picked it up with long pale fingers and eyed it curiously for a long while. While he gazed, transfixed, at the little jewel which contained a fragment of his sister's soul she told him how she had created it at Father's urging after she and Tom took the Ministry, how Father wouldn't let her tell Tom, how Father used to _talk _to her _all _the time.

Expression sympathetic, Tom slid the emerald back across the table towards Elizabeth. Carefully she caught it and slipped it back into the depths of her robes. After that, all her old secrets began to spill out. She told him she was an Animagus; Tom reacted very amusingly to that, as if he had just realised something blindingly obvious. She told him how she had spent their five years travelling the world secretly trying to find a way to bring Father back to life. She told him how often Father had taken control in those last few dark days before her death. She told him how she had found the Resurrection Stone in the heart of Hogwarts' Forbidden Forest, and how she had proved a disappointment to Father even then.

"Why did you save me?" Tom asked. He was now leaning forward animatedly in his seat. Outside the window to Elizabeth's left, the street was deserted except for the occasional passing Muggle car - and the tall figure still standing beneath a nearby streetlight. "More importantly, _how _did you save me?"

"It's a long story," she warned.

Tom held his hands up helplessly. "I'm dead," he said, with a hint of a smile. "I've got all the time in the world. Come on, tell me."

And so she went on. She told Tom how she had woken in a crumbling farmhouse in the middle of Moldovan nowhere, restored to life and body by her mysterious benefactor. "That wasn't you?" she asked hopefully - but Tom shook his head, as puzzled as she was.

Elizabeth told him of her painfully slow return to London, how she had sought old Professor Croaker out at his rainy suburban home, how she had purchased a new wand with the help of some Polyjuice Potion she had found in one of her old stashes - the same stash in which she had found the two slender vials she had hidden beneath her cloak now, though she didn't mention _that _to Tom. She told him how she had Apparated back to the Death Chamber below the Ministry of Magic. She told him how she had travelled back in time.

Tom spluttered incredulously at that last one, of course. In answer she simply slid the little silver Time-Turner from her pocket and placed it before Tom on the table. Smiling - certain this had to be one of his strange sister's strange jokes - Tom picked up the Time-Turner and peered at it closely with a pale blue eye. He traced a finger across the device's twistable face-dial, scratched at its silver casing with an overgrown nail, studied the delicate mechanisms inside; then he made to spin the Time-Turner between forefinger and thumb.

"I wouldn't do that," she warned him slyly.

Tom's eyes, glinting with amusement, met Elizabeth's, and he sent the Time-Turner spinning. His eyes abruptly widened for the slightest instant - and then he was gone, disappeared into thin air in the blink of an eye. Elizabeth sighed exasperatedly. Across the cafe, the blonde-haired waitress's reaction was slightly more dramatic. She screamed incoherently, eyes goggling, and dashed across the cafe's black-and-white-tiled floor towards Elizabeth's table. "Your friend - your friend..." she stammered, staring wide-eyed at the seat which Tom had so recently occupied.

In one lazy movement Elizabeth drew her wand and pointed it over her shoulder at the waitress. "_Obliviate_," she drawled.

The waitress returned to her sweeping. Once she had moved off, Elizabeth glanced back to her left - and the window. As she expected, the tall dark figure across the street had left the dancing lights and shadows of the lamppost and was striding across the road towards her. Five seconds later the cafe's door swept open with a soft electronic ding and Tom stepped into the cafe beaming like a madman. "I just time-travelled, didn't I?" he asked happily, positively bouncing across the cafe floor towards Elizabeth's booth.

"You did," she confirmed, grinning at her brother's obvious joy as he set the Time-Turned down upon the table before her. He had always loved playing with magic. "How did you pass the hour?"

"Oh, I went shopping."

For the first time since his re-entry Elizabeth noticed how _different _her brother looked. He had had a haircut, and a shave, and now wore neatly-tailored Muggle clothes instead of his filthy rags. "Where did you get the money?" she demanded suspiciously.

Tom just touched his nose infuriatingly. "I have to have _some _secrets, Elizabeth."

They both laughed then, and for a moment all was well between the siblings. Smiling, Tom pointed at the little silver Time-Turner, still sitting on the tabletop between the pair. "When - when did you _make _this?" he asked, awestruck.

Elizabeth fixed her features in a determined expression of haughty reposement. "Not all of us spent the last week rotting in a Hogwarts dungeon, Tom," she said aloofly - and then burst into another fit of giggles.

Tom smiled thinly, and took a deep sip of his coffee. "Still warm," he remarked gleefully, glancing again pointedly at the Time-Turner. "I don't suppose it-"

"It doesn't go forward."

"Oh."

They chatted for a while, catching each other up on all the events that had transpired in the chaotic last week (or from Elizabeth's perspective, the last two weeks) since they parted in the Atrium of the Ministry of Magic. She was particularly interested to hear of the Unbreakable Vow Tom had sworn to Lily Potter - and how it had nearly burned him alive. Her skin crawled as she listened to Tom's lurid descriptions; she had seen what disobeying an Unbreakable Vow could do only too well. "Do you still have it?" she asked. "The Vow?"

Tom could only shrug. "I guess I'll find out if I ever see Lily again," he said, smiling bitterly. "I'd better stay away from the Weasleys from now on, though. I can just see Hugo or his dad ordering me to jump off a bridge."

Their conversation was suddenly interrupted by the passing waitress, who enquired if they wanted anything. "Er - yeah," said Tom, snatching up a laminated menu. "I'm starving. Can I get a - er...burger and chips, please?"

"We don't do food at this time," the waitress informed him sullenly. "Only coffee."

"Oh," he said. "Sorry. Can I get a coffee, then?"

As the waitress nodded and moved off, Tom flashed his sister a pointed glance. For some reason he was grinning playfully. It was only when his pale blue eyes flitted slyly downwards to the Time-Turner that she understood. "Don't you dare," she warned him. "I want to get back to the present before I'm old and grey. Besides, it's too dangerous. Go back eight hours here and you'll probably land on some Muggle's lap."

"But I'm hungry," he groaned. "Hey, I don't suppose you got a glimpse at the lottery numbers when you were in the future?"

Elizabeth just rolled her eyes. Neither sibling spoke again until the waitress returned with Tom's coffee. Elizabeth paid for it with some of the Muggle money she had stolen, and the waitress shuffled off again; when Elizabeth turned back to her brother he was leaning forward pointedly across the table. "Let's hear this plan of yours, then," he said.

"Are you still suicidal?"

Tom instantly sobered, his smile freezing and fading to a cold thin line. "Just tell me," he said quietly. "Hypothetically speaking. I'm alive. You're alive. The world thinks we're dead. What do we do now?"

She shrugged playfully. "I suppose we could get jobs."

"I had a careers interview at school once," he remarked, making a sour face. "It didn't go very well."

"We'd need new identities," she continued thoughtfully. "We'd fake our deaths first, of course. Between the pair of us we could conjure up some bodies that would fool anyone at the Ministry. First though, there is the more important issue of our appearance. We are rather distinctive, you know. Thankfully, I have a few ideas."

"Your famous plan?" Tom glanced warily at the bustling blonde-haired waitress. "Maybe we should go somewhere more private."

"No need." Elizabeth flicked her wand towards the prowling waitress, and the Muggle woman froze in mid-stride. Her mop clattered from her limp hands to the floor. Her brown eyes stared unseeing at the ceiling. Another deft flick of Elizabeth's ash wand; the cafe's window-shutters snapped shut and the door locked itself with a soft _click. _Finally she lowered her wand-tip to the table, and two small empty drinking-glasses appeared there. "Shall we?"

"What are these for?" he asked curiously. Tom reached to study one of the little glasses - but Elizabeth slapped his hand away. With her other hand she slipped two slender vials of translucent liquid from beneath her cloak. Into each glass she emptied a vial of potion, then tossed the empty vials over her shoulder to shatter on the next table over. Elizabeth slid one glass towards her brother and the other towards her. Both glasses were utterly indistinguishable from the other - which was important, as her brother had always had a nose for potions and poisons.

"These," she said, "are our new start. Drink."

Tom raised his two-inch-tall glass to eye level, swirled its contents once, then peered curiously into its depths. He took a sniff. "What's this?"

"It's an appearance-altering potion," she answered. It was only half a lie. Each glass _did _contain the potion she said it did, a distant variant of the Polyjuice Potion - but Tom's glass also contained a rather potent memory-wiping potion. Elizabeth hadn't wanted it to come to this, but if Tom was going to get all doe-eyed and teary every time the subject of their past exploits came up - well, this was the only way to get her brother back. "As permanent as I can make it. Come on, Tom. Bottoms up."

Tom met Elizabeth's eyes. He blinked, and pale blue irises were washed away, replaced by those oh-so-familiar scarlet slits. As he set his glass down upon the table with a dull finality, there was a sad gleam there. "Elizabeth, I'm not going to drink this."

He rose to his feet, and Elizabeth rose with him. "Why not?" she demanded angrily. "So you can go back to Hogwarts? Back to _Lily_?"

"Yes."

"They'll kill you."

"Hopefully." Tom pushed past his sister's outstretched arms to stride away towards the cafe's locked door. "Knowing my luck, they'll just torture me in a series of excruciatingly painful ways. Or maybe they'll give me to the Dementors, wouldn't that be fun?" He rattled the cafe door, but it failed to budge. "Good luck with your plan, Elizabeth, it's a good one. Now, if you wouldn't mind unlocking this door-"

"Tom," she said icily. When Tom glanced to his right, he saw Elizabeth's wand levelled at his chest. He failed to move away from the cafe door in a timely manner, so she slashed her wand, and a great invisible hand yanked her brother back towards her. Elizabeth shoved him back into their little booth. "Drink," she ordered, taking a seat opposite her brother.

For some reason, Tom smiled. "If you say so, Beth. Together?"

She nodded impatiently, and pressed Tom's glass into his hand. Elizabeth clinked her own glass against Tom's, then both siblings drained the bitter-tasting transparent liquid in one gulp. Instantly their appearances began to bubble and change. It felt not unlike the effects of Polyjuice Potion - except that this was rather more painful. It felt as if every cell in Elizabeth's body were being picked apart by small sharp needles and then resown together. Across the table Tom's mouth was contorted in a pained grimace, but his eyes were still fixated on his sister - and there was an amused gleam there.

His hair had lightened to a dark-brown sheen, more wavy and curly than it had been moments before. Elizabeth's had done the same. Their complexions were less wan, as if they had spent a week tanning theirselves in the sun. Elizabeth, always unnaturally tall, winced as every bone in her body shrunk. She was suddenly three inches or so shorter. The potion seemed not to think that necessary for Tom, but his hands shrunk, his body proportions tweaking slightly, and Tom too groaned in pain. There was a sudden searing pain in Elizabeth's corneas, and then her eyes were a deep dark blue. Tom's were a shade paler.

Her nose, her mouth, her ears; all were tweaked slightly by the potion. If she gazed into a mirror long and hard Elizabeth might - _might _- just have recognised herself. Across the table, Tom looked as shaken as she felt. They could have been twins - handsome brown-haired twins.

"Tom?" Elizabeth queried suspiciously, as her brother turned to study his reflection in the window. The memory-loss potion took a few seconds longer to kick in than the appearance-altering one, but Tom should be beginning to feel its effects by now. "Feel any different?"

For some reason, Tom smiled. "I'm sorry, Elizabeth," he said ruefully, turning away from the window to fix her with his pale-blue gaze. "You're too predictable."

"What are you-" but suddenly Elizabeth cried out in pain as a jolt of electricity crackled through her brain, and she slumped almost out of her seat. Only Tom's quick arm stopped her falling to the floor. "What - what did you-"

"I probably shouldn't have done it," he sighed. "It's cruel - but you left me no choice, really. At least one of us should remember the things we've done, and it should be me. You deserve better." He smiled again. "You deserve your new start."

Elizabeth's vision was suddenly hazy, and growing hazier. The world seemed to be melting away before her, and new images flashed before her eyes instead; a tall dark tower, a black-haired man, a woman with long blonde curls, a bloody underground chamber, faster and faster and faster the images came and went and slipped away. With a heart-stopping jolt of fear she realised what Tom had done. "You switched the glasses."

He nodded sadly, as the images began to flash past faster and faster. They roared thunderously past now; an old professor in a dark room, a tank filled to the brim with brains, a little girl in a pretty dress...Elizabeth reached desperately for her wand, but found she had forgotten where it was. "I knew you'd make me drink. I did it while you weren't looking."

"Will you-" speech was getting harder and harder for Elizabeth, and words seemed to slip away as soon as she reached for them- "will you kill me?"

"No," he said, placing a reassuring hand on Elizabeth's shoulder. "You'll get your second chance. So will I, I suppose."

"You - you..." With the last of her strength Elizabeth seized a fistful of Tom's robes and pulled him close. "I - I - the Time-Turner - Croaker - _Lucy_..."

Tom blinked. "Who's Lucy?"

But it was too late. Elizabeth was gone. A woman with no name slumped to the floor, and the world faded to black.


	6. The Other Girl

_The Other Girl_

* * *

><p>The black-haired boy disappeared into the flames, and resigned to her fate Lily turned away to face her onrushing father. She folded her arms across her chest - a defensive, defiant gesture that had been her standard response to her parents' displeasure ever since she was a little girl - as Mum, Dad, Lily's uncles and aunts and a dozen angry others sprinted across the Hogwarts lawn towards her. Behind them, the setting sun was shining prettily through and between the castle's towers.<p>

"What the bloody hell did you do, Lily?" Uncle Ron yelled furiously, bulling straight past his twenty-two year-old niece towards the flames in which Tom Riddle had just disappeared. Before he could take even another three steps in that direction, though, the tall green flames withered and vanished. Cursing in frustration, Uncle Ron rounded instead on Lily. "Where's he gone?"

"He's gone to kill his sister." Lily, staring stubbornly up at the furiously-flushed face of her lankiest of uncles, was a picture of icy calm. "I decided it was the best thing to do."

For a moment, Uncle Ron's sheer apoplexy seemed to get the better of him; his lips were moving wordlessly as Lily turned away. To her left, the others who had came with him gaped on in stunned silence at what Lily had done. Her parents were among them - and her brother Albus too, she saw now. Mum was gazing at Lily's throat. A ring of clawed red-purple bruises was rising all the way around Lily's pale neck. When Mum noticed Lily's attention, she shook her head wondrously.

Beside Mum was Albus. He was the double of his father, lean and wiry and thoughtful and kind. From him Lily saw a sympathy - if not quite understanding - that she was deeply grateful for. Dad, on his part, looked utterly baffled by Lily's actions. As his eyes met Lily's, his hastily-Spellotaped spectacles slid down to the end of his nose, and with an uncertain hand he slid them back into place again.

Also here were virtually all those that Lily and Tom Riddle had freed from Azkaban only a day or two before, and more besides. Seamus Finnigan, Dean Thomas, Aunt Angelina and Uncle George, Uncle Bill, Aunt Fleur and her sister Gabrielle (both looking, despite their flushed faces and quizzical expressions, absolutely radiant in the twilight), Teddy Lupin, Ernie Macmillan, cousin Hugo...the list of accusing eyes went on and on and on.

Lily opened her mouth to try and explain - though she had not the faintest idea what she might say - but before she could get a word out Uncle Ron was back in her face. His red hair was overlong and matted, and his index finger was stabbing accusedly down towards her.

"_You _decided!" he exclaimed. "Who gave _you_ the right, Lily? What the bloody hell did he tell you that made you let him go? You know he's heading straight back to his sister? They'll be laughing at you in their bloody tower right now. He killed my wife and daughter, Lily, and _you_-"

"You're wrong," she interrupted coolly. "Tom didn't kill Aunt Hermione or Rose. He killed a lot of people, but Aunt Hermione was murdered by Harper Davis, not Tom. I was there. You want revenge? Harper's down in the dungeons right now. _Elizabeth _murdered Rose, Uncle Ron, I was there too - and now Tom's going to kill Elizabeth. We're certainly not going to do it any time soon." Lily gave her uncle a withering look. "Tom's not going back to _join _his sister. He's not _laughing _at us. He knows she has to die."

"How can you trust him?" Uncle Ron spat. "That lying freak - you can't believe a word he says-"

"I can," said Lily. "He swore an Unbreakable Vow to me, remember? Tom told me he was going to kill his sister, and now he has to try - or die. He _can't _betray us, Uncle Ron. Do you really think I'd have let him go if he could?"

"I want him to _die._"

"Too bad," said Lily evenly. "I ordered him not to."

With that, she moved away from the lanky red-haired man and the slightly-charred patch of grass from which Tom had disappeared towards her family. Lily hesitated a moment, wondering if they shared Uncle Ron's feelings - but then Mum hurried forwards to embrace her daughter in a warm hug, and Lily almost collapsed into her arms. Mum's fingers traced an inadvertent line across the still-raw skin of Lily's neck, though, and Lily winced in pain.

"Sorry," Mum whispered. "Did - did _he _do this to you?"

Lily nodded weakly. She knew she would never be able to explain her actions - perhaps not even to herself - so she just relented into her mothers' comforting arms and allowed the tears at last to flow. Tears for all of it, she thought; for James, for Roger Smith, for Rose and Aunt Hermione and the Malfoy family and Elizabeth Selwyn and everyone else the Riddles had murdered. Even for Tom. They had been friends once, when he had just been a sweet little boy who couldn't understand why the world hated him so.

From what felt like a great distance, Lily heard Dad speak. "Maybe Lily's right, Ron," he said. "We can't find Elizabeth. Even Gabrielle can't. There's just too many ways for a witch as powerful as she is to hide if she doesn't want to be found. Tom could be our only chance."

With a scornful noise, Uncle Ron pushed past his brother-in-law and stomped away back towards the castle. As Lily disengaged herself from her mother's arms to watch him go, Dad placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "He'll come around," Dad said. As the others who had come with Dad and Uncle Ron began to file off towards the front steps of Hogwarts - some seeming to have accepted the wisdom of Lily's decision, others still shaking their heads in disbelief - Dad lowered his voice so that only he, Mum, Albus and Lily could hear. "You really think Tom'll do it?"

Lily looked up at him and nodded with a conviction she didn't quite feel. "I guess we wait and see."

Together, the four Potters returned to the castle. Mum and Dad insisted that Lily go up to the hospital wing to have her bruised neck seen to. Albus accompanied her up - Mum and Dad had gone to try and find Uncle Ron, and placate him somehow - and on the way up to the hospital wing Lily found herself enjoying the opportunity to catch up with her brother. They hadn't even really spoken since his return from Switzerland. Albus' light-heartedness was infectious, and Lily soon found herself chatting happily and laughing along with him with an ease of spirit that she hadn't felt for what seemed like years.

As the matron was patching up Lily's bruised neck, Lily inquired about Albus' wife Rachel, and her two little nephews James and Alex. All three were safe and well in Switzerland with the International Confederation of Wizards, Albus told her. Again, he made her laugh with his tales of two-year-old James' antics. To her brother's eternal credit, he didn't mention Tom or Elizabeth Riddle once. Afterwards, Albus went to get something to eat down in the Great Hall, and Lily, refusing his invite politely, wandered the castle's corridors alone for a while.

She had no purpose or destination, really; she just wanted to take her mind off of the nerve-wracking wait that lay in store for her, and what would be, she was sure, one of the longest evenings of her life. Even that wasn't truly successful. Every corner turned, every familiar sight, every half-recalled childhood memory; there were too many ghosts here for Lily for her mind to ever be truly at ease.

Now, she sat in brooding silence in a draughty corner of the Great Hall, clustered together with Albus, her parents and a few others - Luna Lovegood, Uncle Bill and Aunt Fleur, Seamus Finnigan's daughter (and Lily's old classmate) Niamh - amidst a sea of happily-chatting students. They were just...waiting. Waiting for Tom to return, for Elizabeth to attack, for someone to dash in with the news that either or both or neither of the Riddles were dead; the hours slipped by at a snail's pace.

Slowly, the students of Hogwarts dwindled away into their cosy common rooms, and above Lily's head the Great Hall's enchanted ceiling steadily darkened to a starry blanket. There wasn't a cloud in sight, and the moon was almost full. Would she ever hear of Tom again, Lily found herself wondering. Had she really been as foolish as Uncle Ron thought? The red-haired man had stormed into the Great Hall at about eleven o'clock in the evening, thrown a few dark looks around, and then left just as soon again. He had been heading in the direction of the dungeons, Lily hadn't failed to notice.

The night dragged on, and in dribs and drabs everyone else waiting up for news of the Riddles drifted off to bed. As Niamh Finnigan, yawning, rose to leave - she and Lily had shared a dormitory at Hogwarts, of course, and she and Albus were the last ones left now in the Great Hall besides Lily - Lily promised to catch up with the dark-haired woman once - and she crossed her fingers beneath the table as she spoke - once things had returned to normal.

Most of the wizarding world was still in hiding, of course. It was only yesterday Niamh had shown up at the gates of Hogwarts looking for her rescued father. Until the damage Tom and Elizabeth Riddle's brief reign of terror had done had been assessed, who could even say whether things would _ever _return to normal? Not Lily. Smarter people than her would have to figure out how to piece the wizarding world back together.

With a tired wave of goodbye Niamh left, and though Albus fought off sleep stubbornly he soon conceded defeat too. "Night, 'Lil," he said, rising slightly unsteadily to his feet. "Make sure you get some sleep, OK?"

With a slight wan smile, she nodded, and then it was only Lily alone in the Great Hall's cavernous darkness. At about half three in the morning - after fending off a particularly gruelling series of yawns - she decided to stretch her legs. Rising, Lily crossed the half-darkness of the Great Hall - pale blue strips of moonlight were her only illumination as she walked - and stepped outside into the deserted Entrance Hall. After a moment's consideration, she strode out through the castle's open front doors onto the cascading brown-stone steps.

There was Hagrid's hut, off in the distance to Lily's left. A dull orange light was glowing from its windows. Lily could just about make out the sleeping silhouette of one of Hagrid's Hippogriffs by the stone hut's front door. Beyond was the ominous shadow of the Forbidden Forest, and past that dark mountains and a starry sky. Lily glanced away, across the sweeping lawn of Hogwarts towards the Hogsmeade road - and for a moment, she thought she saw emerald-green flames spark into life in the darkness.

They were gone in an instant, though. Lily rubbed at her bleary eyes, but the flames didn't reappear - and neither did Tom. She quickly convinced herself that it had been simply a trick of her sleep-deprived mind and, sighing slightly, she turned and went back into the Great Hall to continue her vigil.

Lily woke to find a wrinkled hand shaking her shoulder gently, and a familiar, kindly voice calling her name. As her brown eyes snapped open she was momentarily blinded by the warm sunlight streaming in through the Great Hall's windows. When her vision finally resolved into something more detailed than a lurid shifting blur, Lily saw a little old man standing before her. He wore a crumpled white lab coat that was speckled with blood.

"Professor Croaker?" she asked uncertainly. Jerking upright, Lily rubbed feebly at her tired eyes. She had fallen asleep slumped over the Gryffindor table, she realised; her back was aching fiercely. Aside from her and the old Unspeakable she, Tom and Gabrielle Delacour had pried from Elizabeth's clutches a day or two ago, the Great Hall was empty. The castle was still asleep. "What are you doing here? I thought you went home."

"I did." Croaker's scrawny throat bobbed in and out as he spoke, and for a moment Lily's gaze was drawn to a glinting golden chain he wore around his neck. She was sure she had never seen it before. "I woke up early this morning. Next door have the builders in, coming and going at all sorts of hours, and - well, that's not important. I was finishing off some research on - well, that's not important either, I suppose. What _is _is that I decided to return to my office in the Department of Mysteries to retrieve some old materials of mine, and - well..."

Croaker ran an uncertain hand through the tufty remnants of his white hair. Between his wrinkled fingers, Lily suddenly noticed, he clutched a black-walnut wand that was dripping with crimson blood. _James' wand, _she realised with a sudden chill.

"I think you'd better come see this, Lily," Croaker said.

* * *

><p>Two days later, a dozen or so esteemed figures of the wizarding world - and Lily - met in what had once been the offices of the British Minister for Magic. The Riddles were surely dead, after all. Everyone in this room had, at one point or another, seen the mess Tom and his sister had left in the Death Chamber of the Department of Mysteries. Surely, not even witches and wizards as prodigiously talented as they were could have survived losing that much blood.<p>

What was more, one of Professor Croaker's Unspeakable coworkers - a bright, amicable young man named Charlie Avery, previously responsible for studies and research into the nature of death before the Riddles' attack on the Ministry - had examined the strange stone archway in the blood-soaked Death Chamber, the one with the black veil hanging below it, and Avery had decreed that something or someone had passed through the veil within the last twenty-four hours.

Lily wasn't entirely sure why something passing through the veil wouldn't simply come out the other side of the archway, but when she put the question to Avery, he had just snorted amusedly and turned away. Unlike the others, she wasn't sure if Tom was dead or not. The Unbreakable Vow she had sworn to him was still bubbling away in the pit of her stomach. It told her Tom had achieved his goal and killed his sister. Tom himself, though...

The others all seemed to think he was dead - whether out of rational thought or sheer hopeful optimism Lily didn't know - and so the process of rebuilding the British wizarding world could commence. It would begin at this table. Clockwise from Lily around the wide, finely-carved oak table that Aunt Hermione had sat at the head of so many times sat Dad, Neville and Luna Lovegood. Beyond the blonde-haired woman with protuberant grey eyes were Natalie McDonald and Gabrielle Delacour.

The Auror Office had been decimated during the Riddles' attack on the Ministry. So many had been poisoned or cursed while Tom roamed around freely, invisible, and his sister wore the face of Lily's mother, that slight dark-haired Natalie, Uncle Ron and two others who had been away during the attack were quite literally the only Aurors left. Uncle Ron hadn't been able to face today's meeting, and so Natalie was here in his place. The rest of the chairs around the table were occupied by other various Ministry representatives.

Most were former heads of department. Professor Croaker was here, representing the Department of Mysteries. He sat beside his colleague Avery. Avery was a few years older than Lily, dark-haired, tall and burly yet handsome for all that. On Lily's immediate right was her affable Uncle Percy, head of the Department of Magical Transportation. Past Percy was a man from the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol - the Department of Magical Law Enforcement's rank and file, as opposed to the more elite and specialised Aurors - and two others Lily vaguely recognised, but couldn't recall the names of.

Lastly, seated directly opposite Lily was Melinda Bobbin, head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation. It was she who had plotted this meeting with Gabrielle Delacour, and decided who should come. Albus had wanted to come too, but Bobbin had forbidden it. She had said Lily's brother was unnecessary. No doubt, as soon as Lily left the meeting Albus would pop up demanding to know what had gone on. She smiled slightly at the thought.

Her brother had actually spent most of the last six months with Bobbin; he, Hugo, Bobbin and a substantial group had fled abroad to the headquarters of the International Confederation of Wizards after the Riddles seized control. Lily had opted not to go, preferring to remain at Hogwarts and do whatever she could to continue the fight. In the end, though, it had been the contribution of those in Switzerland that had made the telling difference. Albus told Lily that Bobbin had been critical in convincing the Confederation to finally bestir itself and take action against the two mass-murderers.

Melinda Bobbin was a stern-faced woman in her fifties. Her dark-brown hair was drawn up in a tight bun. She wore impeccably-neat robes dyed a bland grey. She couldn't have stood in starker contrast with Lily - eyes heavy with lack of sleep, robes fraying and torn from too many hectic battles, vivid red hair a mess - if she had tried.

It was Bobbin that was speaking now.

"The Ministry, as it stands, is chronically understaffed," she said in a brusque, officious manner. "Obviously many remain in hiding, but many more will have to be recruited anew. The shops of Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade are empty. St. Mungo's is closed. Azkaban is infested with Inferi. Our first priority has to be getting the country's infrastructure back up and running. That means getting the goblins back into Gringotts as soon as possible, and getting people out of their homes, back to work and back spending money again."

She paused for a moment, as if expecting objections; there was a hurried flutter of nods and murmured assents from around the table. Lily suspected - and she included herself in this - that most of those sitting around the table were utterly out of their depth with this sort of thing. Only Gabrielle Delacour and Bobbin herself seemed to know what they were doing.

Bobbin's dark grey eyes slid now to Neville. "You'll need to send the students of Hogwarts home as soon as possible, Headmaster. That should hopefully convince the population that things are now safe."

Her gaze lingered pointedly on the Headmaster of Hogwarts. It was a few seconds before he (and Lily) realised that Bobbin would wait for him to leave and carry out her bidding before she continued. "I'll - er - get right on that," Neville said, lurching rather abruptly to his feet. "Coming, Luna?"

Once they were gone, Bobbin turned to Gabrielle Delacour. "We're in a woeful state, Madam Delacour," she said. "The security of the British wizarding world has been, understandably, awfully neglected for months. Dragons are running amok in Wales. Giants have resettled the Scottish mountains. Dementors have infested an island off the Yorkshire coast. Hundreds of escaped Azkaban prisoners are still running free."

Lily jerked upright at that last one. She had entirely forgotten the prison riot Tom had incited in Azkaban, and all the criminals he had freed, back when he and Elizabeth were doing all they could to unsettle and terrify the wizarding world. It seemed so long ago. Beside Lily, Dad looked similarly disturbed. Involuntarily he scratched at the back of his hand, and the faint scars that could be seen there; _I must not tell lies. _Surely she couldn't still be alive after all these years._  
><em>

"You have two hundred well-trained witches and wizards here," Bobbin continued to Delacour. "Can you spare some of them until we are back on our feet?"

"I suppose so," said Delacour in her clipped accentless tones. "We can possibly-"

"Good," Bobbin interrupted curtly. "We'll need a loan as well. One hundred thousand Galleons?"

Without waiting for a reply she turned to face Natalie McDonald. "Miss McDonald, in the absence of Ronald Weasley I suppose you'll have to stand for the Auror Office. We need more Aurors as soon as we can, as many as you can find. How good they are doesn't matter. What _does _is putting a very clear Ministry presence back on our streets. We need to show that any signs of dark magic will be stamped out immediately."

"Students who've just left Hogwarts might be a good bet," Bobbin concluded. "A new, strong, youthful force of Aurors is just what the public need to reaffirm their trust in the Ministry. Even look to those students who've just completed their sixth years if you must, I'm sure Longbottom will understand."

"Sixth-years?" Natalie blinked uncertainly. "You want us to take teenagers out of school and make them Aurors?"

"They can train on the job," Bobbin said dismissively. "If they're of age and not utterly incompetent, make the offer. Of course, it won't be obligatory. If they wish to continue their studies they may do so. Now..."

And so Bobbin's attention moved on. An hour passed in this manner, the stern-faced Head of the Department of International Magical Cooperation issuing her instructions to all and sundry. Lily soon found herself fidgeting. She had never had any patience for this sort of thing. She didn't want to be in here _talking _about putting things right. Lily was itching to get out that door and do - well, something, quite fancied having a crack at taming a dragon.

More realistically, she had to find Tom or his body. She still had to find _James' _body, to see if her five-years-dead brother was buried where Tom had said he was. Maybe then her family could finally have some closure, and begin to put this horrible, harrowing last five years behind them.

Unfortunately for the impatient Lily, Bobbin seemed to be saving her for last. One by one all those around Lily left the office, dispatched on one arduous task or another by the woman who seemed to have taken charge of proceedings. Uncle Percy was placed in charge of recruiting new employees to fill the Ministry's depleted departments. Dad, to convinced those _old _employees - and the rest of the wizarding world - who were still in hiding to come out, that the chaos was finally over.

One man was sent to bring the good news to the Muggles' Prime Minister. Gabrielle Delacour left to persuade the goblins to return to Gringotts from abroad. Croaker and Avery were sent back to the Department of Mysteries and invited to use their talents in whichever way they saw fit. Finally, Bobbin's grey gaze turned on Lily. They were alone in Aunt Hermione's old office now.

"You're a bright girl, Lily," Bobbin said. She sounded as if she were trying to seem affectionate, but she was quite failing. "Brighter than any of the idiots that allowed this whole mess to happen in the first place. You understand the way things are in a way your father, your uncle, your aunt, they never did. This business with the Riddles, it _can't _happen again. I'm sure you understand that. It would be the end of us."_  
><em>

"Yes, ma'am." Lily wasn't quite sure what else to say.

"Lily, I want you to be my new head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement."

Two thoughts flashed through Lily's mind in quick succession. _  
><em>

_Me? Head of Department?_

_Your new head? _

Lily voiced the second of those thoughts.

"Who else would you have as minister?" Bobbin asked indignantly. "Your father? He resigned in disgrace and hasn't been an official employee of the Ministry for over five years. Or maybe someone else from your extended family, perhaps? Ron Weasley? Your mother, or another of your uncles? No? No, Lily, you know as well as I do that relying solely on her friends and family was Hermione Granger's greatest mistake. _I _won't make that mistake."

Lily stared across the dark-oak table at Bobbin for several moments. "I'd love to be Head of Department," she said finally. "I'm sure you'll make an excellent Minister for Magic, Melinda."

"Good," said Bobbin. "That will be all."

"See you later." Lily rose to leave. "If you don't mind, I'll get to rounding up those escaped prisoners as soon as possible."

Bobbin nodded curtly. "Oh, and Lily?" she called as Lily pulled Aunt Hermione's office door - no, Bobbin's now - open. "Try and be more competent than your predecessors, please."


	7. Closure

_Closure_

* * *

><p>When his sister stepped outside the Minister's office, Albus was waiting for her, perched casually on the edge of what he suspected was traditionally the desk of the Minister's foremost secretary. At twenty-four, he was a year older than his sister, and they had always looked rather different. Albus was lean, of middling height and bony. His hair was black as coal, an overlong, untidy mess that fell down almost into his startlingly-green eyes. His close-fitting black robes were ruffled and dusty. They were the only pair Albus had brought with him from Switzerland, and there hadn't exactly been much time for clothes shopping recently.<p>

All in all, Albus thought, he cut an unimposing figure - not that there was anything wrong with that. His face, unlike so many others he knew, remained relatively unlined and carefree. Of course, he had lost people too - his brother, his aunt, his cousin, friends and coworkers - but somehow, on a wholly personal level, most of the chaos and strife of the past ten years had entirely passed Albus by.

While Tom Riddle had been torturing and murdering his schoolmates in his sixth year at Hogwarts, Albus had been busy studying hard for his N.E.W.T.s. While Riddle and his mysterious sister disappeared to travel the world - (that Unspeakable Charlie Avery from the Department of Mysteries, evacuated from the Ministry before the Riddles' attack and subsequently swept across the sea to Europe like so many others, had done painstaking research on this over the last six months. With remarkable skill, Avery had managed to track the Riddles' bloody path across the globe, from a tall dark tower in the Yorkshire moors to the mountains of Tibet and the grasslands of Eastern Europe) - during all that, Albus was getting married and starting a family.

He had known Rachel ever since his first day at Hogwarts. They had met on the train when she was looking for a carriage, and then again in Potions class when the alphabetical-seating system threw them together. She was a Ravenclaw, but their friendship had blossomed despite that separation. It was Rachel's father who had given Albus his first job after Hogwarts, an office role at a multinational magical supplies corporation headquartered in Birmingham. While Lily rose through the ranks of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Albus rose through the ranks of the marketing department.

Five years later, when the Riddles returned hell-bent on some twisted idea of revenge, Lily and Mum and Dad and Rose and pretty much everyone else in Albus' extended family had rushed to join the fight. Albus himself had been more preoccupied by earning a living and raising his young family. He had two little boys, James and Alex. When the Riddles attacked the Ministry and murdered Aunt Hermione, Albus was with his wife and children at their suburban home. It was only when Lily showed up at their door - face streaked with dust, blood and tears - that he knew what had happened.

After that, he, Rachel, James and Alex had gone with Lily to Hogwarts, and then a day later with Melinda Bobbin, Hugo, Charlie Avery and all the others, across the sea to Switzerland and the International Confederation of Wizards. Lily had stayed behind to fight, to try and find a way to free their parents and the other prisoners. Six months passed.

When the message came through to those exiled in Geneva - that Tom Riddle had been captured - Albus had returned, though his family stayed behind in their rented Swiss cottage. In truth though, he had done little more than sit around in Hogwarts' Great Hall while Lily did all the real work with Tom Riddle. Albus had never even_seen_ this Elizabeth Riddle, whereas Lily had faced her and her foul brother time and time again.

All of that told now on his sister's face. Her skin was haggard and pale. Her brown eyes, always so bright and full of life, seemed clouded over with a dull, tired fog. Beneath those eyes sat deep, blotchy blue-purple circles. Her hair was dry and straw-like, a faded, dull bronze-red colour, as if she had been left out in the sun too long. Her light-grey robes were fraying at the seams. Everyone said Albus was the double of his father, but Lily took more after their mother; short, slender, she carried herself with a certain wary feline grace as she moved.

When he saw her, Albus rose to his feet and grinned warmly in greeting. "Well?" he asked. "What happened?"

As she crossed the dimly-lit office space towards him and sank into an empty chair, Lily's returned smile was slightly wan. "I...I think I just became Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement," she said uncertainly.

She looked so utterly baffled by her appointment that Albus chuckled. "Well - congrats, I guess," he said. "Come on, tell me what happened."

As they talked, they walked, away from the Minister's office - to be occupied by Melinda Bobbin now, from what Lily said - through the narrow, snaking corridors of the inner Ministry towards the Atrium. There wasn't a soul about. "Stop worrying, Lil'," Albus urged as Lily finished recounting all that had taken place in the meeting and wondered aloud what on earth she had been thinking when she accepted the offer. "You'll do great. Melinda thinks a lot of you, you know. She was always asking after you when we were in Switzerland. Making sure you hadn't - you know, met a gruesome death."

"Really?" As they stepped into a lift and began to ascend towards the Atrium, Lily chewed at her lip thoughtfully for a moment, then brushed her dull-red hair away from her face. "Weird," she finally remarked. "I don't think I'd ever even_ talked _to Bobbin before you guys showed up at Hogwarts with Gabrielle and the rest of the cavalry."

"I think she's had her eye on you for a while," Albus said. "Melinda said you were a - er, how did she put it? Oh, yeah, a 'top prospect'."

"Who gave her that idea?" asked Lily bemusedly.

Together, they stepped out of the lift into the almost-deserted Atrium. There were a few of Gabrielle Delacour's black-robed I.C.W. troops milling around by the edge of the stagnant golden fountain to Albus and Lily's right, each taking turns to see who could throw up greater jets of water with a flick of their wand. They looked rather bored. Elsewhere, a few cleaners were scurrying to and fro working to clear up the inches-thick layer of dust and dirt that had built up upon the once-spotless black marble floor. Other than that, they were alone. "Let's get out of here," Albus said. "Coming?"

"Back to Hogwarts?" Lily asked with a certain resigned numbness.

"Nope." As she turned to Albus, obviously surprised, he grinned again. "I saw Neville back at Hogwarts before I came here to find you," Albus explained. "He's sending the students back to their families. Everyone else - Niamh, her dad, Uncle Bill and Aunt Fleur, Uncle George and Aunt Angelina - they've gone too. We're going home."

After a moment, Lily's grin echoed his own, and she took his arm. When they reappeared from the vortex of Apparition, they stood before their childhood home. It was a draughty old farmhouse, expansive and sprawling and crumbling in places, a stone-and-timber island amidst miles and miles of rolling green Kent countryside. It was the first time either of them had been back for six months. Mum and Dad were already here. There was a fire glowing in the kitchen window, and the smell of food cooking drifting steadily outwards, and no place in the world could have seemed more warm or inviting to the Potter siblings than that farmhouse did now.

"Congratulations again, by the way," Albus said as they walked across the muddy ground towards the farmhouse's front door, a bracing country breeze gusting in their faces and snapping at the hems of their robes. "You're the first ever twelve-year-old head of department in the Ministry."

"Oh, shut up."

"Mum and Dad'll be so proud. Hey, you'll be Dad's boss now!"

Lily made a face. "Boy, that's going to be awkward."

"So awkward," Albus agreed mock-sagely, and his sister punched him playfully on the shoulder.

That evening, the four Potters sat down to eat dinner together. When Lily and Albus first arrived, the house was dusty and filthy from its long abandonment, but together they and Dad - Mum was busy cooking dinner in their massive old AGA oven - tidied things up, and lit a fire in every grate, and soon it began to feel like home again. When they were gathered around the wide wooden kitchen table, plates heaped with delicious Weasley cooking, the last ten years could almost have not happened at all.

Almost. The seat beside Albus was empty. During the meal, they all did their best to avoid mentioning it, but Albus could tell it was looming large on all their minds. Still, for almost two hours they ate, drank, and for the most part chatted happily. Topics of discussion included the future of the wizarding world, whatever had become of Tom and Elizabeth Riddle, whether Uncle Ron would be alright with only Hugo for company tonight, how long it would be before the Quidditch season recommenced - the table was divided along gender lines between the Chudley Cannons and the Holyhead Harpies - and what each of them would do with themselves in the uncertain future to come.

Lily's appointment by Melinda Bobbin as Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement was an area of particular discussion. Dad almost choked on his dinner when Albus broke the news. At first he and Mum had worried that it was too much, that the job would consume Lily, but slowly she convinced them that it was something she wanted to do.

"What about you, Dad?" Lily enquired over dessert. "Being an Auror, I mean. Are you going to make it official again? What about you, Mum?"

Albus' parents exchanged a glance. "We probably should," Mum said to Dad. "I'm not going back to the _Prophet _any time soon, and you, Harry...well, you're there all the time, anyway, you might as well get paid for it."

"Looks like you'll have your whole family working for you, Lily," Albus chipped in. "I'm thinking about joining up myself."

Seated immediately to Albus' left, Lily started in surprise. "But - what about your job?" she demanded. "What about Rachel and James and Alex?"

"I don't_ have _a job anymore," Albus told her. "The board of directors went straight back to America when the Riddles started killing people. From what I've heard, they don't plan to reopen the British side of things any time soon. So..." smiling slightly, he shrugged. "I figured my sister's head of the department now, a little bit of harmless nepotism might be in order. Besides, someone's got to look after you, Lil' - make sure you actually get some sleep now and again. You know how absolutely awful you look, don't you?"

"What about your family?" Lily prodded stubbornly.

"They're safe in Switzerland," he said. "If we find the Riddles' bodies and get the all-clear that things are safe, Rachel will bring the boys back. Until then...she'll understand." Privately, Albus could imagine his wife's reaction to the news that he had taken up a vocation as dangerous as fighting criminals, deadly creatures and Dark wizards could be, but he didn't share that with Lily.

"Well..." she said uncertainly. "I mean, what would you do? Be an Auror?"

"I don't know." Albus shrugged again. "The way things are just now, is there any point getting bogged down in job titles? There's so many things all over the country that need sorting out. You need people you can trust around you, Lily."

Slowly, his sister nodded. Some time after finishing their meal, the four Potters rose to their feet and stepped outside into the farmhouse's front garden. Hand in hand - Lily leading the way - they turned and vanished into thin air with a loud _pop. _They Apparated to a place Albus had never been before, though instantly he knew it from Gabrielle Delacour and Charlie Avery's descriptions. His insides twisted violently and his skin crawled as the dark, numbing weight of Voldemort's tower set over him.

All around, mottled-purple moorland stretched out to the horizon. The Potters stood upon a craggy hill, an island jutting upwards from a purple sea. Before them, the sun was setting behind a black stone tower that twisted upwards into the dark-blue sky like a melted candle. The sight of it sent an unnatural shiver down Albus' spine, and he suddenly found himself fighting a persistent urge to turn and flee as far as he could. It was his first trip to one of these towers, and it was not a pleasant experience.

"I can see it," Mum muttered disturbedly. "I thought I wouldn't be able to."

"When Delacour came here to search the tower for Elizabeth she had the concealment charm broken," Albus said. "It was Avery that did it. The Unspeakable."

As Albus gazed up at the five-hundred-foot-tall tower, he could almost feel the colour draining from his face. He wanted to turn away, but his eyes seemed irresistibly drawn to the structure. With what felt like a colossal effort, he turned to his brown-eyed sister, shivering beside him in the twilight.

"Where - er - where did Riddle say he was, Lil'?" he asked shakily.

Silently, Lily turned away towards the western edge of the hilltop, and moved to the hilltop's crumbly-stone edge. Her footsteps sent pebbles skittering all the way down to the foot of the hill, deep down into the shadow of the tower. Far below the Potters, at the point where the moorland lapped up against the base of the rocky hilltop, there was a clumped cluster of tall leafy holly bushes, surrounded on all sides by three-foot-high stalks of grass swaying slightly in the wind. Albus supposed that must be it. Unless Tom Riddle had lied to Lily, that was. By all accounts, he tended to do that.

Lily flashed a pointed glance over her shoulder at Albus and her parents, then began to scrabble down the hill's steep western side. Albus went after her first, then Mum and Dad a few moments later. They joined Lily by the foot of James' grave. It was a hard flat patch of sun-baked dirt, overshadowed on all sides by three-foot-tall undergrowth and tall holly bushes. The grave was unmarked, but unmistakable. They stood in silence for a long time. When next someone spoke, the sun had set.

"I - should we - should we move him?" Lily asked eventually in a small voice. "Will he - I mean, he might be..."

Mum let out a small choked sob at that, and releasing Dad's hand she hurried a few feet away into the undergrowth. As she sniffled quietly to herself and Dad turned to converse to Lily in low whispers, Albus moved to comfort Mum, stepping with some difficulty through the waist-tall grasses. "Mum," he said, stepping to her side, "it's OK, we'll-"

Suddenly, Mum screamed. Her eyes were wide and frightened, fixed on something in the grass that Albus hadn't seen, and she was stabbing down towards whatever it was with an outstretched, trembling finger. Albus followed her gesture, leaning forward urgently - and then he saw it, and recognised it immediately. It was another grave. Hidden in the grass at the foot of the hill was another bare patch of dirt, also unmarked, this one slightly smaller than James'.

"What? What is it?" Dad exclaimed, hurrying through the undergrowth towards them. Lily was a step behind him - and then they both saw it at once, and froze, horrified, in their tracks. "I - I..." Dad glanced sidelong at Lily, glasses tilted askew. "Lily - do you know...did Tom ever say..."

"I think I can guess," she said in a choked voice barely above a whisper, tears coming unbidden to her eyes. "_Why, _though? Why _her_? All those people that died at the Ministry, and he...why the _hell..._" shaking her head in utter despair, she stared down at the unmarked grave. "I think it's Aunt Hermione's."


	8. New Faces

_ New Faces_

* * *

><p>A week after she said goodbye to Tom Riddle on the front steps of Hogwarts, Lily was sitting at her neatly-ordered desk in the heart of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement when a short sharp knock came at her door. "Come in," she called to whomever was waiting there, hurriedly wiping the bleariness from her eyes and fixing her bedraggled hair as best as she could. The last few days - ever since Melinda Bobbin assumed control of an exceedingly-willing Ministry of Magic and set everyone to work - had been so hectic that Lily had been reduced to snatching a few moments' sleep at her desk whenever she could. She hadn't been back to her own bed in the London apartment she had once shared with Rose Weasley since before the funerals of James and Aunt Hermione, two days ago now.<p>

The department - _her _department, Lily still sometimes had to remind herself - was woefully overstretched. Lily was juggling a hundred different crises. Despite how things appeared to the common witch or wizard on the street, as the infrastructure of the wizarding world slowly trundled back into life - the shops and banks of Diagon Alley and Hogsmeade, St. Mungo's and its Healers, even the _Daily Prophet _- the wizarding world remained in dire need of repair. A lot had happened in the last six months, after all.

Most worryingly, some of the escaped criminals Tom Riddle had freed from Azkaban a year ago seemed to have organised into some sort of secretive wizarding crime syndicate that preyed upon wizards, witches and Muggles alike. From what little Lily and her investigators had been able to learn so far, the organisation had already murdered three (a married pair of former Ministry employees and a Muggle teenager) and had stolen from countless more. They were organised and effective; they planned their crimes in detail ahead of time, and struck ruthlessly when the time came. Lily would have to do something about them fast.

To add to her troubles, magical creatures of every shape and size, left unchecked for six months - dragons, Dementors, giants, Quintapeds, Inferi - were running rampant up and down the length of the country. Dark wizards had been captured in Calais, just over the English Channel in France, attempting to sneak into Britain - and those were only the ones stupid enough to be caught. God only knew how many had made it over here already, Lily thought - and what on earth they were after.

Someone had even broken into the famously-secure British Wizarding Museum - twice. Both times the unseen culprit had stolen immensely valuable (and dangerous) artefacts. Any other time, the thefts would have been Lily's top priority. The whole department of Magical Law Enforcement would have been out searching for the culprit. These days, however...anyway, Lily couldn't help that. Maybe these thefts were related to the escaped prisoners, she reflected now. Maybe the Dark wizards were flocking into Britain to inflate the prisoners' ranks ahead of an attack on the still-weak Ministry. Lily was probably just being paranoid. Still, she made a mental note to follow that line of thought further when she had the chance.

As hastily-appointed head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, it was Lily's job to snuff out all of the unrest and strife as soon as possible. Every day, Melinda Bobbin was down in Lily's office demanding progress reports. Lily could only reply that she was trying her best. Maybe it was the Minister for Magic behind her door now, stern-faced and demanding an explanation as to why Lily had not dealt with the giant tribe in the Scottish mountains yet.

But when her door swung open, it was Niamh Finnigan who popped her head through the open space. "Lily?" the young woman called. Niamh's short dark bangs framed a pleasant, oval-shaped face. "There's a few memos out here you should see - oh."

The cause of Niamh's surprise were the four neatly-folded paper planes that, even as she spoke, zoomed over her head into Lily's office and dive-bombed towards the red-haired woman's desk. Hurriedly - she had just tidied her desk that afternoon, after all - Lily slipped her wand from beneath her ruffled grey robes and jabbed it into the air towards the paper planes. Instantly, they froze in mid-air, and rising to her feet Lily gathered them safely into her arms. Inter-departmental memos; much cleaner than owls, Grandad always said.

"Thanks, Niamh," Lily said, peering curiously at the first of the memos. As head of department, subordinates were always looking for Lily's help and advice. "You look tired, you should-" Lily paused, barely stifling a yawn herself- "you should go home. Get some sleep."

"Maybe," Niamh agreed. Lily wasn't the only one who had been working hard these last few days; there were big sunken bags beneath Niamh's big pale-green eyes. "See you tomorrow, Lily."

"See you," Lily echoed as Niamh turned away, already yawning again, and Lily's office door swung shut behind her.

Lily hadn't wanted a secretary, but Bobbin had insisted. The Minister had wanted Lily to take one of the new recruits that were flooding into the Ministry; Lily had refused, though. If she was going to have someone that close to her, Lily wanted someone she could trust. She'd learnt _that _lesson from Aunt Hermione and Harper Davis. And so she had asked Niamh, and her old school friend had been only too happy to oblige. Niamh, like Lily's brother Albus and so many others, had lost her old job when the Ministry fell.

Lily turned her attention to the four memos she had received, now all unfolded before her. As head of department she oversaw the Auror Office, the Improper Use of Magic Office, the Wizengamot, the Hit Wizards, the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol, the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office and hundreds of other departments and sub-departments and sub-sub-departments, so many she couldn't even remember the names of most of them. Most of the department's employees had been driven into hiding by the bloody feud with the Riddles, but slowly they were returning. As a result, there was always someone - more than a few someones, generally - with questions that needed answered.

The first memo was from the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office. Apparently, some miscreant was exploding toilets in Dorset. Lily scribbled a quick reply - she had bigger things to spend her time on than exploding toilets - then reached for the second memo. It - hastily scribbled on a piece of spare parchment - was from the acting head of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol. The Patrol had been searching for the hideout of the escaped Azkaban prisoners for several days, and they had a lead. They wanted to know whether Lily wished to be involved when they moved in. She promised she would be there. Maybe this would be the break-through they needed.

The next slip of paper was from Natalie McDonald. The female Auror in her mid-forties (acting head of the Auror Office in Uncle Ron's continued absence) was protesting again about Minister Bobbin's dictate; the one that involved, as Natalie put it, 'trying to lure teenagers and schoolkids into the Ministry'. Lily sympathised, but in her answering letter to Natalie she could only admit that when it came to Bobbin, she was helpless. The Minister for Magic was impressively (and annoyingly) single-minded; it would be like trying to argue with a brick wall. Instead she promised Natalie that any seventeen year-olds who did volunteer to join the Aurors - or any other area in her department - would be paired with experienced Ministry personnel for as long as it was necessary.

Hopefully Natalie would be contented for now. Setting the woman's neatly-penned letter aside, Lily reached for the last memo. _Sending someone your way, _the note read in an impatient scribble that implied a very busy writer. _Bit of a strange fellow - talented, though. See what you make of him. _The note was signed off with a pompous squiggle that could only belong to Uncle Percy. Lily contemplated the note for a moment through tired eyes, uncertain what to make of it.

Suddenly, someone knocked at Lily's door.

"Come in," she called uncertainly, and her office door swung open inwards. A tall brown-haired man stood in the doorway; young, in his early twenties, boyishly handsome, he wore plain black Muggle work dress, and when his pale-blue eyes met Lily's he beamed happily for some reason. "Who are you?" she asked blankly.

"Oh." The brown-haired man's smile faded slightly. He took a step forwards into the gloominess of Lily's windowless office, and her door eased shut behind him. "I'm - er - Thomas."

"You're - er - Thomas?" she echoed dryly. "You don't sound too sure."

"OK, I'm definitely Thomas. Happy?"

"Not really. What are you doing in my office, Thomas?"

"I'm here about a job," he said, grinning again as if delighted by some private joke.

"Oh!" she exclaimed in sudden realisation. "You're the one who's a bit of a strange - er, I mean-" seizing up Uncle Percy's memo from the desk, she flapped it indicatively in the brown-haired man's direction- "Uncle Percy sent you. Sorry, I didn't realise. Er - take a seat, please."

"Take a seat?" Thomas glanced quizzically around Lily's office. Aside from the chair Lily sat on, the only other seat was a battered old armchair in a darkened corner away to his left. It was that armchair that, as Aunt Hermione had once told a wide-eyed thirteen year-old Lily in happier times, Tom Riddle had sat in when he was first discovered and brought into the Ministry. Lily had listened to her aunt's description of her then-friend Tom with rapt wonder - how he had sat in silence, scarlet-eyed, and scowling, until suddenly he screamed, and in that instant somehow seemed to pick up perfect English. The armchair was not ideally placed for a face-to-face interview. "Over there? Should I move it closer-"

Thomas grabbed the chair's arm, and pulled it towards him - or rather, tried to. The armchair steadfastly refused to budge. Lily watched with a slight smile as Thomas tugged once more, blinked, confused, then turned back to her. "It's stuck in place," he said. "A Freezing Charm, I think."

"You figured it out quickly," Lily said. "Most people spend ages trying to get that chair to move."

Thomas fingered the hilt of his wand, protruding an inch or so from his trouser pocket. "I could move that chair."

"I'm sure you could, but don't bother. I'd rather you conjured your own. It's part of the basic aptitude test I do," she explained.

"Oh. That's quite clever, actually."

"Why the tone of surprise?"

He just grinned, and slipped his wand from his pocket. Thomas flicked it nimbly towards the empty patch of carpet on the other side of Lily's desk, and a cushy leather armchair appeared from thin air there with a soft _pop. _Crossing the room in three long-legged strides, he sank into it. "Good enough?" he enquired.

"Yup," she agreed. "It's far from the worst attempt I've seen, anyway. One time a guy didn't know how to conjure a chair, so instead he tried to curse me and steal mine. I think he thought he'd get points for effort or something."

"How rude."

"He didn't get the job. Anyway, moving on..." Lily opened her mouth to explain the interview process to Thomas - she had already been through at least a hundred job applicants this week and was getting, she felt, rather good at it - but before she could begin she failed to stifle a rather loud yawn. Thomas' pale-blue eyes twinkled amusedly and, slightly-abashed, she continued. The process was simple; Lily would ask her potential employee a few questions, get to know them a little, find out where they might be best suited to working, all that sort of stuff. Suppressing yet another yawn - badly - Lily asked Thomas to tell her a bit about himself.

"Sure," he said. "It's quite a long story, though. You won't fall asleep?"

"I'll try my best," she said sardonically.

"If you like, I invented this handy little charm a while back that'll wake you right up-"

"Just - _talk._"

Again, he flashed that bloody grin of his. It was equal parts irritating, endearing - and, somehow, annoyingly familiar. Lily was too tired for this. As she listened to Thomas begin his story, her eyelids felt like velvet curtains. Thomas and his sister, he said, were home-schooled by their Muggle mother. Their father left before they were born; their mother made sure of that. She hated magic, Thomas said with a glint of real bitterness in his eyes, said that his mother didn't want some _freak _- he almost spat out the word - hanging around her children.

He and his sister Beth were twins. She was here today, actually, down in the Department of Mysteries. Apparently, she was the cleverer of the two; a real genius, Thomas said with a fond smile. She would be inventing time travel or raising the dead by the end of the week, he said. After that brief interlude, Thomas returned to his story of his adolescence. His and Beth's mother tried to hide their magic from them when they were children, but he and Beth figured it out when they were sixteen.

"You never went to Hogwarts?" Lily interjected, surprised.

"Nope," Thomas agreed cheerfully. "No O.W.L.s, no N.E.W.T.s. Is that a problem?"

"I - well...no, I suppose," she said finally. Lily found herself wondering what Minister Bobbin might think if she employed someone with absolutely no wizarding qualifications, and almost smiled. "It depends on what you can do, I guess. If you're as - er - talented as Uncle Percy says you are, I'm sure you'll do fine here."

"Great," said Thomas casually, who looked in absolutely no doubt as to the desirability of his particular talents to the Ministry. "Anyway, we'd always known we were - well, special - but it wasn't until me and Beth-"

"Beth and I," Lily corrected reflexively.

"What?"

"You keep saying 'Me and Beth'. It's 'Beth and I'."

"Really?" he said disinterestedly. There was something about those pale-blue eyes of his that made Lily wish already that she hadn't brought it up. "Anyway..."

He continued with his story. It wasn't until he and Beth were sixteen that they first 'twigged' that the weird stuff they could do was _magic _- and that their father had been a wizard too. One day when they were poking around the attic, they found a pair of old wands he had left for them, hidden where only a witch or wizard could find them, and a letter for the two teenagers explaining what the wands were. What _they _were. Again, their mother tried to stop them from continuing with it. She tried to take away their wands. So, Thomas and Beth ran away from home to try and find their father.

"Did you ever?" asked Lily.

"No."

"I'm sorry," she said sympathetically. "What was his name?"

"Sebastian Gaunt. He might be calling himself anything by now, though. We don't even know what he looked like." Thomas sighed wistfully, then launched once more into his spiel. After they ran away from home, they lived for a while in the Muggle world, scraping by on odds and ends. Muggles weren't so keen as Lily was on people with no qualifications, Thomas said with a thin bitter smile. They taught theirselves magic whenever they could using an old textbook their father left them. He was all they knew about. In his letter to them, their father had neglected to even mention the existence of a wizarding world. They were utterly unaware that there were other wizards out there until a year or so ago, when Thomas inadvertently stumbled across the Leaky Cauldron._  
><em>

"We've been sort of keeping an eye on things since then," he finished, "but it was all so overwhelming, and what with those Riddles murdering people left, right and centre...Beth and I were too nervous to really, properly take the plunge, I guess."

Lily eyed the mousy-brown-haired man thoughtfully. "Until now? Why?"

"We get the _Daily Prophet_," he explained. "When we found out a few days ago that those Riddles were dead - or missing, or whatever the deal with them is - and that the Ministry was recruiting like crazy, we thought it was too good an opportunity to miss."_  
><em>

That was the end of Thomas' tale. When he had finished, Lily explained to him that these were extraordinary circumstances; the Ministry didn't normally employ people on the back of a fifteen-minute conversation. There were background checks. Lots and lots of interviews. A trial period, where new recruits were rotated through the department's various offices and sub-offices and over time discovered where they would be best suited. If one wanted to become an Auror, there was a three-year training program - and that was if you passed the stringent entry tests. Not these days, however; now, the Ministry took whomever it could get.

"Lucky for me," Thomas said.

There was something about his easy smiles - they never quite seemed to reach the cold blue depths of his eyes - that made Lily suddenly lean forward, a new brusqueness to her manner. _Let's rattle him a little, _she thought. "You said you and your sister lived in the Muggle world?" When Thomas nodded, she steepled her pale fingers before her on the desk. "Did you ever steal?"

"What?"

"You heard me," she repeated sharply. "All that time you were living in the Muggle world. Two young wizards, poor and alone, for all you knew the only two _special _people in the world...come on. You must have."

He hesitated slighly before he answered. For the first time, Lily saw a flicker of calculation in his pale-blue eyes, and she realised that for all his smiles, this was a very cold, very clever man. A dangerous man. She'd have to be careful with this one. "We did," he finally admitted. "Only - only from the big supermarkets, though! Never from - from actual people! We never - Lily, I mean, we never robbed a _bank _or anything like that..."_  
><em>

"No?"

"No!"

Lily nodded thoughtfully. "What's the worst thing you've ever done, Thomas?" she probed next. "Magically, I mean. Everyone makes mistakes. Once I accidentally turned my cat into a watermelon. What were yours?"

"Does the Ministry normally ask these sort of questions?" Thomas spluttered.

"I do," she said coolly. "I have trust issues."

"I..."

"Come on," she urged. "You're young and, by the sounds of it, completely untrained. There had to have been mishaps. Tell me."

Thomas' face had gone pale. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and deadly serious. _Well, I rattled him alright. _"I tampered with my sister's memory once," he admitted. "She - she was in the middle of a bad break-up, and I thought - I thought she might be better off forgetting..."

He trailed off, looking so disconsolate that suddenly Lily felt rather guilty. Maybe she had gone too far; obviously, this was a sensitive subject for him. "It's fine," she reassured him, hurriedly stepping out from behind her desk to move to the brown-haired man's side. She placed a hand on his shoulder; even through the fabric of his robes, his skin was cold. "Luckily for you, Tom - can I call you Tom?"

"I prefer Thomas."

"Well, Thomas," Lily said in an attempt at a soft, kindly voice, "like I said earlier, the Ministry can't afford to be picky just now. There's other people, much worse people, murderers and rapists and all sorts of scum out there who we need to stop as soon as we can. I'll take pretty much anyone I can get." She gave him a warm smile. "Besides, you don't seem that bad. Basically, the policy I've been going by is that if you're good enough, old enough and not _utterly _evil you'll get a job here. Just keep the bad stuff in the past, OK? Particularly the memory-wiping stuff. I'd be a lot more comfortable if you swore an Unbreakable Vow to never do that again. To anyone. Could you do that?"

"Aren't those illegal?"

Lily just gave Thomas a withering look.

"Sure," he said quickly, eyes darting briefly to Lily's pale hand - still on his shoulder - and then away again. "I'll do anything."

After that, Lily returned to her seat and asked Thomas what else he could tell her about himself. He and his sister Beth were born on the sixteenth of November. They grew up in Newton, Surrey; Thomas advised Lily that it was rubbish, and not to go there. Their best childhood friends were Aaron and Sally. Their - but Lily never got to hear what Thomas would say next, as she interrupted him with an inadvertent, embarrassingly-loud yawn. Too late, she clapped a hand to her mouth to silence it. "OK, OK," she said quickly as Thomas began to grin his infectious grin, "that'll be enough. Let's get on with the aptitude test, shall we?"

Thomas passed with flying colours. Embarrassingly easily, in fact, for Lily who had devised this test; he'd passed far faster than even she could have. _Great, _she thought darkly, _I finally get rid of one pain-in-the-neck boy-wonder wizard, and here's another one in his place. I wonder how much trouble this one'll cause. _Moving on quickly from this thought - it was unfair to compare this Thomas with the evil, twisted psychological mess that had been Tom Riddle for even a moment - Lily was just opening her mouth to ask Thomas what department he saw himself working in - but then her door swung open again, and her father stepped forwards hastily into her office.

Harry Potter looked healthier than he had in months. His black hair was trimmed short - though still messy as ever, of course - and now streaked through with grey. Mum teased him about it endlessly. His face was clean-shaven, and finally beginning to lose the gaunt aspect it had acquired during his long captivity. His round-rimmed glasses, freshly repaired for what must have been approaching the hundredth time, were perched askew on the end of his once-broken, slightly uneven nose. His lightning scar, blazing, agonising crimson for so long, was now only a thin red line stretched across his temple. Only occasionally, Dad promised Lily, Mum and Albus, did it twinge in pain.

When Dad noticed the brown-haired man slouched in an armchair on the near side of Lily's desk, he blinked uncertainly for a moment. As his eyes met Thomas', the corners of Dad's mouth seemed to tighten slightly, and for an instant Lily thought she saw his fingers twitch upwards towards his scar - but then Dad shook his head slightly and turned back to Lily.

"They've found them," he said.

"Umbridge?" Lily asked. The evil old bat had been in Azkaban when Tom Riddle had perpetrated his breakout, and she hadn't surfaced since. Most likely she was lying dead in an alley somewhere, but even so...

But Dad shook his head. "The Riddles," he said.

Lily's face paled. Instantly forgetting Thomas beside her, she lurched to her feet. "Where? Are they-"

"They're dead," Dad said. "Delacour's people found them in some quarry in Kent, and brought them back. They put them down in the Department of Mysteries for now. You'd better come see. Er - is he coming too?"

Lily glanced sidelong at brown-haired Thomas. "Sure, why not?" she said, stepping around her desk towards her father. She jerked her head indicatively towards the younger man as she passed. "Coming?"

"They've found the Riddles?" Thomas asked confusedly as he rose to his feet. "But - I thought they were already dead? Who killed them? Who found them?" He gawped past Lily at her father. "Hey, are you Harry Potter? You're famous!"

Lily rolled her eyes. "Dad, Thomas Gaunt. Thomas, Dad. Shall we go?"

Five minutes later they stepped into the entrance chamber of the Department of Mysteries. The room was circular, its walls a deep matte black, and it was lit by blue flickering candles that cast an eerie light over proceedings. A pretty young woman with mousy-brown hair was waiting for them. "Er - hello," she said, with a nervous toothy grin towards Thomas as he stepped through the narrow doorway behind Lily and her father. This must be his sister, Lily realised. "I'm Beth. Professor Croaker sent me to show you in. The - er - the bodies are just through here, if you could just - er - follow me..."

Behind Lily, Dad and Thomas, the door they had entered through swung shut with a soft _hiss _of escaping air. Reflexively Lily closed her eyes, sure the walls were about to rotate in that fierce, dizzying manner they had - the blue candlelight streaking across her vision always gave her a headache - but, for some reason, they didn't. The twelve narrow doors remained where they were. "What's wrong with the walls?" Lily enquired curiously of the brown-haired girl. Beth had half-turned towards the doorway behind her, though her eyes were still turned entreatingly to Lily and the others as she waited for them to follow her further into the department.

"Oh." Beth blushed, folded her arms across her chest nervously, then unfolded them again and stuck her hands into the pockets of her robes. "I - er - I broke them. It was a mistake. I'm going to fix it as soon as I can. Er - this way, please."

With another quick shy glance at her brother, she moved away towards one of the narrow black doors set in the circular wall, and - as Lily gave Thomas a quizzical look, and he shrugged - the others followed. They stepped through into the Hall of Prophecies. This was all old hat for Dad and Lily, of course, but it was Thomas' first visit to the Department of Mysteries. He marveled aloud at the tall rows of crystal-ball prophecies as they walked, and besieged his companions with incessant questions. Soon after, he moved forward to talk to his sister, and Lily was free to question her father about the finer details of the discovery of the Riddles' bodies.

Soon enough, they reached their destination. Beth still leading the way, they stepped through a narrow half-hidden alcove behind a tall shelf of prophecies, and emerged into what Professor Croaker called the Death Chamber. A hundred feet below in the deep, wide pit at the foot of the stairs, a white sheet had been placed at the foot of the fluttering black veil. A crowd had already clustered around there, Unspeakables and Aurors and Gabrielle Delacour's black-robed I.C.W. troops. All Lily could see from up here of the bodies were fleeting glimpses of pale, half-rotted flesh, and a limp, outstretched hand; skin pockmarked and peeling, fingernails overgrown and filthy.

Hesitantly, heart suddenly thumping nervously for some reason, Lily made her way down the steps towards the pit. Thomas and his sister had gone ahead before her and her father; when they reached the bottom Beth lead him over towards old Professor Croaker and another man, his coworker Avery who had been at Bobbin's meeting five days ago. Both Unspeakables were perched nonchalantly on the pit wall eating their lunches. Beth stole a fleeting, nervous glance towards Avery as she sat down beside Croaker, Lily noticed.

Reaching the pit, Lily began to make her way through the crowd towards the archway. She half-recognised a few of the tall black-robed figures she passed; gleaming silver insignias pinned to their chests, they were what remained of the International Confederation of Wizards' presence in Britain. Gabrielle Delacour had left a few days ago, taking most of her people - and thankfully, that bloody Chimaera - with her. Those that were left had been working with the few Aurors Lily had to hunt down the Riddles. The Unspeakables Avery and Croaker, both somewhat well acquainted with Tom and Elizabeth Riddle - Croaker had obviously been Elizabeth's prisoner-cum-lab-assistant, while Avery had spent the last six months in Switzerland studying the Riddles intensely - had helped, and obviously together they had succeeded.

As she neared the crowd parted for her, and Lily saw them clearly for the first time; Tom and Elizabeth Riddle, black robes slashed and torn in a hundred places, scarlet eyes glazed and lifeless. The days of exposure to wind and rain and sun in some rock-infested quarry had taken their toll. The smell was horrendous. Lily wanted nothing more than to turn away, to turn her back on this whole sorry affair forever, but instead she forced herself to step closer and kneel beside Tom's body.

"It's the Killing Curse, that's obvious enough," a man said. Lily glanced to her right, and felt another strange, dim jolt of recognition; this time for the man crouched over Elizabeth's pale body, wand in hand. He was a kindly-faced middle-aged man with a thick blonde beard, and he wore the lime-green robes of a Healer of St. Mungo's. After all those weeks she had sat by a comatose Tom's bedside after Draco Malfoy's attack in Knockturn Alley, his Healer's face was permanently etched into Lily's memory. The man with the blonde beard was addressing a younger female Healer, an intern by the looks of things. "The girl, though, that's a different case," the Healer continued, nodding downwards towards Elizabeth. "Lacerations, bruising, knife wounds. She bled to death."

Lily wondered for a moment if the Healer remembered too. He had tended Tom for eighteen months, after all. From the way he glanced at the tall, cold body, and sighed sadly to himself, perhaps he did. As Lily stared down at Tom, she was suddenly, violently reminded of the day they first met, in a gloomy corner of the Leaky Cauldron. _He used to be such a nice boy._

"Did you know him?" Thomas asked softly.

Glancing over her shoulder, Lily saw the tall brown-haired man standing there. The I.C.W. witches and wizards seemed to have left; probably away to inform Minister Bobbin of developments. No doubt Bobbin would form a victorious press statement out of this. "I thought I did once," she said. "But I never did."

"What was he like?" the brown-haired man wondered. "All those things he did...he must have been a monster. A freak."

"He was..." he _was _a monster. He _was _a freak. But even as the words rose to Lily's mind, that familiar burning sensation crept back into her chest; the Unbreakable Vow she had sworn to Tom to treat him like a human being. Seemingly, that continued even beyond death. "He was a murderer," she said simply. "You don't want to know what he was like."

She left Thomas there, and moved to her right, where six feet away Elizabeth lay dead too. That maddeningly-coy grin of hers was still playing across her lips. The one she wore when she killed Rose, no doubt. Lily had no conflicted feelings for _this _Riddle, at least. She was still standing over Elizabeth's corpse when she became aware of someone standing to her right. When she turned, that Unspeakable Avery was there, youthful, muscly-built and rakishly handsome, staring down at Elizabeth thoughtfully. Suddenly, a half-remembered thought occurred to Lily, and she held out her hand.

"I'm Lily Potter," she said. "I was at Minister Bobbin's meeting a few days ago. I'm Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement."

"Yeah, I know," he said, smiling a slightly unsettling smile - verging on a leer, Lily thought. She flashed a glance over her shoulder, to where timid brown-haired Beth was watching on from afar. When she noticed Lily's gaze she blushed and hurriedly looked away. "Do you tell that to everyone you meet?" Avery continued, clasping Lily's small warm hand in his own. "Or is it only the handsome ones?"

Lily hastily reclaimed control of her hand. "I - anyway," she said unflappably, "I just remembered something you said at the meeting. You said that one of the Riddles went through that veil behind us. This room's kind of your field of expertise, right?"

Avery shrugged, and flashed what he intended to be a disarming smile. Lily remained armed. "I guess I was wrong," he said. "It happens occasionally. Anyway, I didn't say it was one of-" he prodded Elizabeth with a booted toe- "them that went through, just that something did. A bird might have got in here for all I know."

"We're underground," Lily pointed out.

"We're wizards. Someone might have Conjured a bird."

"Why?"

He shrugged again. "Dunno. For fun?"

"Er - OK." Nodding thoughtfully, Lily turned away. Across the pit, Thomas was ostensibly in conversation with his sister and Professor Croaker, but his gaze was fixed curiously on Lily. She gave him a slight nod of acknowledgement, then turned away to find her father. He was seated on the lowermost ring of stairs above the pit.

"Are you OK?" he asked as she approached.

"Fine," she said quickly, sinking to a seat beside him. "Er - I was going to go get some sleep. Can you take care of things here while I'm gone?"

"Of course, Lily," he said. "What do you think we should do with them?"

"Bury them," she said. The crowds in the pit had dissipated, and Lily and her father both had a clear view of Tom's half-rotted body from here. "I don't care where or when, but they should have a proper funeral."

"Lily-"

"We're better than they are," Lily reminded him breezily. "They'll have a funeral." She felt as if she could just curl up on the stairs and sleep for days, but she had one more thing to take care of. "Dad, tomorrow, I want you to take Thomas-" she nodded down towards the brown-haired man as he chatted to his sister- "and a couple of others - Albus, maybe, and Hugo if he's finished with the Cornish pixie infestation - and sort out the Quintaped problem. If he doesn't get himself or any of you killed, tell him he's got a job."

"Sure, Lily," he said.

With that she left; left brown-haired siblings Thomas and Beth Gaunt, Unspeakables Avery and Croaker debating some mystery of the universe or another on the pit steps, left the two pale bodies and the fluttering, whispering veil behind. It was about time she got some sleep.

* * *

><p><em>Plenty more chapters on their way soon...<em>


	9. Daydreams - pt1

_Daydreams - part 1_

* * *

><p>"So what the hell is a Quintaped?" asked Tom.<p>

They stood on a cold pebbly beach at the very edge of the British Isles. The sky was a bleak grey-white. It still being summer, the air itself wasn't too cold, but a stinging wind was whipping in from the Atlantic Ocean to the west and gusting violently towards (and through) the quartet of wizards. Dressed only in his work clothes - entirely suitable for the subterranean warmth of the Ministry of Magic, but not quite so for the frozen northwest tip of Scotland - Tom was shivering. The sea, grey and still, lapped gently at his feet as he stood at the water's edge, soaking through the toes of his black-leather shoes no matter how many Impervius Charms he applied.

To Tom's left and right, Harry Potter, Albus Potter and Hugo Weasley were more appropriately dressed for the occasion. They had had the advantage of a night and a morning's preparation, of course; Tom, on the other hand, had simply been told last night by Potter to go home, get some sleep and report to the man with the lightning scar in the morning for an 'assignment'. Lily had disappeared by that point, presumably away to get some sleep, but this was a test of hers, Potter said. Tom was sure Lily would have cooked up something suitably tricky and dangerous for him.

To Tom's left as they stood on the seashore, Harry Potter's hair had been whipped into a frenzy by the wind and drizzling rain. He was nearing fifty now, the man who had freed an eleven year-old Tom from his chains so long ago, and his hair was now almost more grey than black. Beneath his fringe, his lightning scar was stretched taut across his skin, and from the way the corners of Potter's mouth were tightened in a faint hint of a grimace, his scar was paining him once more. Behind his spectacles, his eyes remained that uncomfortable shade of green, but they seemed dimmed and hardened by all the misery Tom had caused him over the years. Potter wore thick, warm Auror's robes, and stared unblinkingly at the island across the water.

The two others stood on Tom's right. Dressed in worn old jeans and a thick borrowed jacket, Albus was a leaner, younger, more cheerful version of his father. Tom had always thought the younger of Lily's two brothers was a bit of a sap, but slowly he was beginning to reevaluate that opinion. Albus had been first to ingratiate himself with 'Thomas' on the way down to the Department of Mysteries yesterday, while this morning, as Tom sat in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement canteen alone nursing a coffee, Albus (along with Tom's old schoolmate Niamh Finnigan) had gone out of his way to seek Tom out and sit with him. Perhaps they could even become friends - assuming that Albus never realised that Thomas was secretly the man who had murdered his brother, of course.

Hugo, past Albus, on the other hand...try as he might, Tom couldn't help feeling the usual surge of resentment as he glanced sidelong at one of his old tormentors-in-chief. Hugo was wrapped up warmly; a thick puffy jacket fell down almost to his knees, an ugly hand-knitted maroon scarf hid the lower half of his face, thick mittens encased his hands and a garishly-orange beanie hat (precisely the same colour as his hair) was pulled down almost over his eyes. One might have thought that Hugo had just returned from a skiing holiday rather than six months spent cowering in fear of Tom and his sister with the bloody International Confederation of Wizards.

With a considerable effort, Tom dragged his eyes and attention away from Hugo, back to the distant rocky island a mile away across the bay. It wouldn't do him any good to linger on thoughts of the past, no matter how satisfying it still was to feed his bitterness with elaborately-constructed fantasies of revenge. That wasn't his past anymore. He was Thomas Gaunt now, brown-haired and well-liked by all. Tom hadn't quite gotten used to his new appearance yet.

Only yesterday morning, for what felt like the thousandth time in the last week or so, Tom had paused before the bathroom mirror as he stepped out of the shower, and wiping away the sheen of condensation that had built up there he had gaped helplessly at the man who stared back.

His hair was thick, wavy and fell down carelessly almost into his eyes. His eyebrows were thicker, his cheekbones less pronounced, his nose shorter and more rounded, his mouth smaller, his lips fuller. Even his eyes were unrecognisable, no longer cat-like crimson slits, unnatural and terrifying, but now round black irises set in cold blue pools. Staring into the bathroom mirror, Tom had barely recognised himself. When he opened his mouth, or raised a hand, or twitched an eyebrow, it seemed as if the brown-haired man was a stranger mocking Tom's own gestures.

That yesterday morning, Tom had felt sure that anyone he had ever known in his brief eventful life - Harry Potter, Harper Davis, Professor Longbottom, even Lily - could pass him in the street and not spare Tom a second glance. And it was true! Standing on the desolate windy beach beside three men he had known for over ten years - one whom Tom had actively despised for that period, and one who was perhaps the closest fleeting glimpse Tom had ever had of what having a father would be like - Tom almost laughed out loud at the thought of how easy it had all been.

He had sat across a desk from Lily; had walked with her and Potter and Ron Weasley and Natalie McDonald and all the others; had made polite small talk with Niamh Finnigan, his classmate for six years at Hogwarts; he had stood over his own _bloody _body, and none of them had realised it! They hadn't even thought to make the laughably simple connection between the siblings Tom and Elizabeth Riddle and the twins Thomas and Beth Gaunt. Of course they hadn't. The connection would never even cross their minds. Why would it?

Tom knew he should have chosen better names - something like Simon or Timothy, perhaps - but, well, he _liked _his name. Besides, he doubted it would matter. As Elizabeth had always been fond of saying, they weren't very smart at the Ministry of Magic. Really, considering all the looming issues Tom had found out about from Niamh - those prisoners he had released running amok, the myriad out-of-control magical creatures, the person or persons unknown (and this one, the Ministry didn't even _know _about) who had brought Elizabeth back to life and no doubt had nefarious intentions - the Ministry were lucky to have Tom and Elizabeth on their side.

Yesterday morning, as Tom stared into the rapidly steaming-up bathroom mirror, a faint echo of his old futile resentment, the hatred that had driven him so long and so low, had rose in the pit of his stomach. _This was what they should have done_. _Potter and Granger. They should have done this right at the beginning, then maybe I wouldn't - wouldn't have..._but the brown-haired man in the mirror had grimaced painfully, and then, as now, Tom had forced those thoughts away. They were pointless, anyway. He could have drunk Elizabeth's memory potion. He didn't. Tom would have to live with what he had done for the rest of his life. He deserved that, to be honest.

He had killed his sister twice now, in a way. Memories made a person who they were. Without them, Elizabeth had been little more than a blank slate - although Tom had quickly changed that. For Elizabeth - Beth now, he mentally corrected himself - their story was fact and memory. Tom, on the other hand, was lying through his teeth every minute of every day. Talking with those whose lives he had torn apart, working with them, even befriending them, knowing all the while what he had done to them, their families and their world...in a way, it was the coldest thing Tom had ever done.

"Thomas?" That morning a day ago, Tom's gloomy post-shower ruminations had been interrupted by a sharp rap on the bathroom door. "Are you done in there?" his sister had called. "I need a shower!"

The brown-haired stranger in the mirror had smiled slightly to himself at the sound of Beth's voice. It seemed to have only taken a lobotomy to turn Elizabeth into an entirely sweet, kind, normal person. It was almost enough to make Tom regret wiping her memories. If she truly _had _changed, as she had professed in that late-night cafe...but those thoughts were pointless. In all the years Tom had known his sister, she had never deigned to wash in any way, let alone _shower_; she considered it a disgusting Muggle habit. Nevertheless she had always seemed perpetually clean, in the same strange way she never seemed to grow tired or hungry.

Now though she showered, and slept, and ate. It was more a result of Tom's magical tinkering with his sister than any change of heart on her part, admittedly. In those first few hours after losing her memory she had been almost catatonic. Tom had taken the opportunity to strip away all the enchantments Voldemort had worked into his favoured child and restore her to as close to a normal human being as he could make her. It wasn't entirely magnanimity that drove Tom; Beth had no idea she was anything other than a normal girl from Surrey, so she or someone else might have began to wonder if she never seemed to sleep or eat. In the end Tom had succeeded, and he had given Elizabeth some nice new memories to boot.

"I'll be out in a minute," he had answered, turning away from the mirror. Picking up his new wand - eleven and a half inches, unicorn hair (or at least he thought so, he was no wandlore expert), holly - Tom twirled it lazily and dried himself in an instant. Another sweep saw him dressed in warm clean clothes. Lastly he pointed his wand over his shoulder, and with a soft _puff _the condensation clinging to the mirror vanished. Pulling the bathroom door open, Tom stepped outside into the apartment's cramped hallway.

The walls were mildewed and brown, and the only lighting a flickering forty-watt bulb, but it was more homely than one of Voldemort's towers, at least. Tom and Beth had spruced it up magically as best they could; the asbestos was gone, anyway, and so was that funny smell from upstairs. Beth wanted to do an Undetectable Extension Charm to give them a little more room, but Tom had pointed out that their landlord might have noticed.

His sister was waiting impatiently in the corridor when Tom emerged from the bathroom. Barefoot, she wore pink-and-purple pyjamas, and her hair was a bedraggled brown mess. "All done?" she enquired.

"All done."

"Great," she said, smiling in thanks as she stepped past Tom into the bathroom. "See you at breakfast. Big interview today!"

The bathroom door swung shut behind her, and Tom turned away, beaming happily despite himself. He headed down the hall and stepped through into a crowded living-room-cum-kitchen. Through the windows in the opposite wall, the sky then had been precisely the same colour as it was now on the beach. A clock on the far wall had told Tom it was nearly nine o'clock in the morning. He poured himself a bowl of cereal, took a seat at the kitchen table then reached for the pile of unopened owl mail that Elizabeth had placed in the centre of the table.

"Oh, good," he remarked aloud as he recognised the postmark of Gringotts upon the top two envelopes. They were addressed to Thomas and Beth Gaunt, respectively; their new accounts must have been ready and open for business. Tom pried his letter open to confirm this, then setting the Gringotts letters aside he leafed through the rest of the pile with a rapidly-growing sense of satisfaction. Birth certificates, health records, tax invoices; it was all here. Their new life was growing more substantial by the moment.

At the bottom of the pile Tom had found yesterday's _Daily Prophet. _Despite his long-held hatred for the newspaper, Tom had pulled it open and flipped idly through its pages as he ate. This being yesterday morning, he had been irritated to discover that the Ministry had still not found his and Elizabeth's bodies. That had been rather frustrating. Tom had conjured up the corpses two days before, and left them at the end of a neat trail of evidence that he had felt sure would lead to their being quickly found. Sighing, he had turned the page and swallowed another mouthful of cornflakes.

The next page described the funerals of James Potter and Hermione Granger, Tom saw with a twinge of discomfort. So Lily _had _followed his directions to find her brother's long-hidden body, and no doubt found her aunt's at the same time. Quickly moving on, Tom had seen official confirmation of what Elizabeth had told him a week ago; Melinda Bobbin had been appointed Minister for Magic, and Lily herself Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. The Ministry itself had taken out a full-page advertisement on page six virtually pleading for able witches and wizards to bolster their ranks.

When the invite had first appeared two days before Tom had torn it from the _Prophet_'s pages. A hastily-penned owl letter later, and he and his sister had an interview with a representative of the Ministry of Magic - Percy Weasley, it had been in their case - about taking jobs there. The interview had taken place yesterday afternoon, and Tom had met Lily in her office some time later that evening. After skimming through the newspaper's sport pages with no real interest - the main topic of discussion seemed to be when it would be appropriate to recommence the Quidditch leagues - Tom spent the next few minutes going over his and Beth's story one last time in his mind, ensuring there were no glaring gaps, chewing over all the possibilities in his mind.

Ten minutes later, his sister had stepped into the room, a happy bounce in her step. Her potion had changed Elizabeth just as starkly as it had Tom. She had always been beautiful - albeit in a cold, terrifying sort of way - but now she was undeniably _pretty. _Her dark-brown hair wasn't knotted or tangled; it was pleasantly damp, and cascaded lushly down her back. She was out of the tattered black robes she had worn her entire life, and now wore clean Muggle attire. Her eyes were a deep, warm blue. All the harshness and cruelty was gone from her features.

Tom watched her take a seat opposite him at the kitchen table with a slight smile. "Ready for our interview, then?" she asked obliviously, flicking her wand over Tom's shoulder towards the fruit bowl. A moment later an apple leapt dutifully into her hand. "I'm still not sure what department I want to work in, are you? Of course, the Department of Mysteries is fascinating, but do I really have the technical ability or knowledge for that sort of thing? I don't know. And the Department of Magical Law Enforcement - well, that's what you want to do, isn't it? We could be partners!"

"Beth, you're an absolute genius with magic," Tom said. "You can go wherever you want. Do whatever you want. The Department of Mysteries will be begging you to join up once they see what you can do."

"Beth Gaunt, Unspeakable?" she said, smiling. "I _do _like the sound of that, I'll admit. Me an Unspeakable, and you...Auror?"

He pictured for a moment trying to work for Ron Weasley, whose wife and daughter he had murdered. The man had tried to strangle him to death once, Tom recalled. "I - well - let's just see what happens, shall we?" he said rather uneasily, returning his gaze to his newspaper.

Later that day he and Beth headed off to their interview. The Atrium of the Ministry of Magic had been bustling with life; the derelict mess Tom and Elizabeth had left behind two weeks or so ago was already long gone. The fireplaces that lined the black-marble walls were crackling with life. Would-be new employees were everywhere, recognisable by their plain clothing; a few were old or middle-aged, but most were young, and many looked barely out of Hogwarts. Tom spied for a moment a familiar face, a young teen girl with long blonde curls, but then the crowds shifted and Daisy Greengrass was gone.

In the centre of it all was Madame Gabrielle Delacour. She stood by the golden fountain in the centre of the Atrium (now restored to sparkling life), pointing here and there and issuing orders to all and sundry. What seemed like her entire I.C.W. retinue - hundreds of young grim-faced witches and wizards in uniform black robes, silver insignia pins glinting on their puffed chests, wands ever-ready by their sides - were clustered around her. Beside her and a step behind stood Melinda Bobbin, a stern-faced woman in her fifties with short brown hair - and behind _her _was Lily Potter. There was a certain glazed, disinterested look in Lily's eyes that suggested to Tom that she was not particularly paying attention to current events. More than that, she looked tired.

Curious, Tom moved closer through the crowds towards the three women and the rest of the I.C.W. forces. Delacour was addressing them now. Tom could only catch snippets over the hubbub of the Atrium and Beth's insistent whispering in his ear - "Come on, Thomas! We're going to be _late_!" - but he gathered that while most of Delacour's people seemed about to return to Switzerland with their leader, a few - entrusted with a nod to Bobbin - would be staying for a while to help restore and maintain law and order. Presumably, Tom thought on the beach in the present, it was those soldiers that had remained who had found the Riddles' 'bodies' later that day and brought them back to the Department of Mysteries.

In unison, as Tom stood in the Atrium, the rest of Delacour's soldiers stood, spun on the spot and disappeared into thin air with a deafening _pop. _The blonde-haired ambassador then pointed at a few of those who remained. "Bring that Chimaera back to Headquarters," she instructed, "_safely. _I don't know how they even captured the thing in the first place. It's lucky the enchantments Riddle put on its cage are still holding."

_And why are they holding? Because I'm still alive. Obviously. _That charms and enchantments ceased with death was a basic part of magical theory, but the import of what Delacour had just said seemed lost on her and the Minister for Magic. Lily, on the other hand, looked suddenly thoughtful. She and all the others presumed Tom to be dead, of course. All his plans could have gone up in smoke at that moment, but thankfully the thought didn't disturb Lily for too long. Shaking off her distraction, she leaned close to Bobbin to whisper something in the Minister's ear - an excuse to leave, probably - then made a hasty exit.

After that, Tom finally succumbed to Beth's stubborn efforts to move him along towards their interview with Percy Weasley, and he had seen no more of Lily until their conversation later that day. But enough reminiscing. Tom's gaze returned to the isle across the sea; the Isle of Drear, Potter said it was called. An apt name. It stood about a mile out, little more than a ring of rocks and a few low green hills. Lily had sent her father here with Tom, Hugo and Albus as some sort of test for Tom, Potter had said; something to do with 'the Quintaped problem'.

Tom was still waiting for Potter's answer to his question - just what on earth was a Quintaped?

* * *

><p><strong>This chapter was looking like coming in at around ten thousand words, so I've split it into three smaller chunks. Don't hate me because nothing happens in this one!<strong>


	10. Daydreams - pt2

_Daydreams - part 2_

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><p>"Excuse me?" Beth called uncertainly as six mauve-robed figures swept down the corridor towards her. Each had a glinting silver 'W' badge pinned to the front of their robes, and they were deeply engrossed in a low, hurried conversation. "Could you tell me where the Department of Mysteries is?"<p>

Without breaking stride they brushed past (and through) Beth, and she was pressed aside against the corridor's black-stone wall. The nearest of the six figures as they passed - a craggy-faced man in his fifties or sixties - broke conversation with his companions long enough to offer a non-committal grunt in Beth's direction and jerk his head over his shoulder. He seemed to indicate a narrow doorway set in the corridor wall some twenty feet away down the corridor. Beth had no time to query the matter further, however; the rest of those in mauve robes didn't even spare the young mousy-brown-haired woman a glance as they went by.

"Thank you!" she called anyway as they strode away down the corridor. They didn't look back. "Rude," she muttered under her breath.

She caught the odd snippet of their conversation as they barreled away into the distance - some woman named Davis seemed to have been on trial for murder, and in the opinion of the mauve-robed figures very much deserved what she had coming to her - but it made little sense to Beth. As the six turned and disappeared around a corner she shrugged inwardly and moved towards the door the older man had indicated. Outwardly, it seemed no different from the tens of other doors that lined this gloomy underground corridor, but when Beth tugged its handle and pushed it open she found herself in one of the most peculiar places she had ever seen.

The room was entirely circular and entirely black. The floor, the ceiling, the twelve identical handleless doors set at even intervals in the circular walls; all were a deep matte black that seemed to drain all light and warmth from the room. The only illumination came from blue shimmering candles fixed upon the walls in the intervals between the doorways.

Behind Beth, the door she had entered through swung shut with a soft _whump. _For a moment the strange circular room went dark, almost pitch-black but for the faint eerie candlelight - and then the walls began to rotate around Beth. The candles were now blazing blue streaks of light burning a horizontal path into her corneas. It was several seconds before they finally slowed and stopped, and several more before the lights dancing in her vision faded and her eyes adjusted to the gloom.

_That's slightly annoying. _Perhaps this was some sort of test for her - or perhaps this was how the department kept out unwanted intruders. Whatever it was, it wouldn't help her find the way out - nor, more importantly, the way further forward into the Department of Mysteries, and this Professor Croaker she was supposed to meet. Beth raised her wand into the air, and with one hard _yank _she dispelled the circular room's enchantments.

She smiled, satisfied. There was so much more to magic than simply pointing a wooden stick and shouting some words, but for some reason most witches and wizards never attained that level of control. She chose a door at random and strode towards it. Beth pushed and pushed against the door's hard black wood - but the door wouldn't budge. Crouching, she peered through the door's keyhole, but she could see only darkness inside.

"_Alohomora!_" she whispered, and pushed again, straining her slender muscles until her face was flushed, but still the door wouldn't open. Even when she blasted it with her wand it wouldn't relent. _Oh well. One down, eleven to go. _Taking a step back she moved to the next door over.

This one fell inwards easily at her touch. Inside was a chamber even darker than the circular room; the sheer blackness in here was punctuated only by sparkling orbs in mid-air that flew here and there at great speeds as she watched. The largest was a burning orange ball, while fifteen others - blue, green, brown, red, purple - orbited around it. The planets, she realised, raising her wand into the air to shine light into the corners of the chamber; it was dusty, deserted and long-unused. This couldn't be the way. She shut the door and turned away.

Inside the next door she chose was a long low-ceilinged room lit by hot orange lanterns. The chamber was dominated by a tall cloudy water-tank. Strange grey-green creatures were splashing around in the tank's murky liquid (Beth was certain from the smell that it wasn't water) but there were no other signs of life in here either. Hastily (again, the smell) she shut the door and moved on, selecting another door at random and pushing it open.

Immediately captivated, she stepped inside. This room was tall and airy, its walls and floor and ceiling a pleasant pale wood, and it was filled somehow with a beautiful sparkling light; as Beth stepped forward it seemed to shift and dance around her like a cloud of fireflies. Every spare available surface of the room - walls, tables, drawers and cabinets - was given over to a ticking cacophony of clocks. They even dangled from the rafters of the ceiling. At the far end of the room two doors - one to the right open, one to the left closed - led off to parts unknown.

In the centre of it all was a tall glass-fronted cabinet filled with strange small little golden things. Beth couldn't quite make out what they were. Beside the cabinet on an old crumbling stone plinth was a tall glass bell jar. As Beth approached the cabinet and the jar, she gaped wondrously to see that there was a brightly-coloured bird caged inside the glass, perched on a little wooden pole near the top of the jar. Suddenly, she released a small muffled 'oh' noise and jumped back a foot or two; the bird had just fallen from its perch and was tumbling towards the bottom of the bell jar.

As the bird fell it seemed to moult its pretty feathers, and _shrink _somehow, smaller and smaller and smaller until it was little more than a wrinkled pink chick plummeting downwards. It hit the jar's glass bottom with a soft ringing _clang_ and lay still. Beth clapped a horrified hand to her mouth, and rushed nearer to press her face close to the glass. As the bird lay prone, still shrinking, she thought it was surely dead - until suddenly a hard white casing sprouted from nowhere to encase the bird.

_An egg, _she realised as the newly-reborn bird broke free from its casing and, flapping its featherless wings stubbornly, began its climb to the top of the bell jar once more. _This is - this is-_

"So the study of time interests you?" a male voice called suddenly.

Beth straightened with a frightened start, and whirled away from the bell jar and the tall glass cabinet it stood beside. When she turned, she saw that two male figures had emerged from the open doorway at the end of the room. One - the one who had spoken, she thought - was short, balding and elderly, dressed in a long white lab-coat and smiling kindly at Beth. The other...tall, dark-haired and rakishly handsome, Beth felt a shy little jolt in the pit of her stomach as his appraising eyes swept over her, amused yet thoughtful. His gaze met hers; Beth felt herself blushing furiously.

"It - it fascinates me," she stammered, drawing her eyes away with a considerable effort from the broad-shouldered man in finely-tailored black robes standing behind and to the side of the old man. "I'm sorry I was sneaking around, I - I was just..."

"It's quite alright," the old man reassured her as Beth edged sheepishly away from the bell jar. "In fact, your obvious interest in the subject is excellent! We haven't had an Unspeakable in the Department of Mysteries willing to study the field of time since - oh, when was it, Avery?"

His companion - Avery - shrugged nonchalantly, though his eyes never left Beth.

"Before _I _came here, anyway," he said. Closing the remaining distance between himself and the now rather timid brown-haired woman in what felt like one stride, he clasped her hand in his own and shook it firmly. "I'm Charlie," he said in an altogether different tone of voice to that which he had used with his coworker. It was soft, amiable yet confident. "Charlie Avery."

Avery was at most a few years older than Beth, perhaps in his late twenties. Beth was tall for a woman, but he towered over her, and was about twice as wide as she was with his burly build. His face was lightly stubbled, but in a manicured sort of way that she suspected had taken a great deal of time to cultivate. He seemed always to be smiling or on the verge of doing so; it was the latter as he turned to indicate the old man now standing some ten feet behind him. "This senile old bat is Professor Saul Croaker," he said. "You must be Beth."

"I - yes," she said rather nervously. Avery still had a firm grip on Beth's hand; his skin was hot and clammy against her own. Beth glanced past him to the old professor, who was eyeing Avery with a strange faintly disapproving look. "I'm pleased to meet you, Professor Croaker, I've-"

"You didn't touch the glass, did you, Beth?" Avery interrupted suddenly. With a spade-like hand he span Beth away from Croaker and back towards the bell jar she had been so eagerly inspecting moments before. Avery's dark-hazel eyes were glinting slyly as, uncertainly, Beth shook her head. "Good," he said, grinning roguishly. "It's very dangerous." Without warning he took Beth's hand and tugged her fingers towards the glass casing of the jar. "See?"

Despite her best efforts to withhold it, Beth emitted a surprised little squeak - their entwined hands had passed straight _through _the glass! It felt rather like being submerged in cold, gloopy water; a strange unpleasant tingling erupted in her fingertips. She tried to pull away, but Avery, chuckling loudly, held her tight in place. She could only watch wide-eyed as the unblemished skin of her left hand and lower arm began to wrinkle and yellow and age. Her fingernails grew milky-pale. Dark brown age spots flared into life. Her flesh rotted and calcified and fell off the bone, and Beth watched, too terrified to utter a sound. Just as soon, the process began to reverse.

Avery laughed as it began; as the thick coarse hair that coated his arms faded, and then the spots and acne of adolescence rose into view, and on and on until he bore the tiny stubby fingers of a child. He stopped laughing, though, and peered closer when he saw the same thing wasn't happening to Beth. She supposed that her lower arm should have been going back in time too, back to her youth and childhood in the Surrey countryside; why then was her arm _elongating _an inch or two, and turning a deathly pale colour, her fingernails long and ragged and filthy?

"That's interesting," Avery remarked, releasing Beth's arm as their entwined fingers returned approximately to normal. For some reason he had shifted a few inches to his left to block Professor Croaker's view of the bell jar. Hurriedly Beth pulled her arm from the glass and, rather flustered, she turned away from Charlie Avery - out of his reach, she made sure - towards the rear of the room where Professor Croaker still stood frowning slightly.

"I - I was looking for you, Professor Croaker," she said, stepping towards the old man in the white lab-coat. "Percy Weasley sent me to find you."

"He did indeed," Croaker agreed. "I received his message not half an hour ago warning me to expect you. Welcome to the Department of Mysteries, Miss Gaunt. My apologies for leaving you to stumble around on your own for so long outside. I was going to send Avery here to find you, but I see you found your way into our Time Room well enough - quite destroying our protective enchantments on the way in as well!"

"Oh - er, the rotating wall..." Beth's flush deepened even further. "I'm sorry, Professor Croaker."

"No matter at all, my dear," he reassured her quickly. "I'm quite sure you'll whip us up something appropriate in its place before the day is out; we hear you're quite the witch, after all. Percy made your demonstration of you and your brother's abilities to him sound rather remarkable. We expect big things from you."

Beth fidgeted modestly.

"You're no doubt wondering what exactly it is we do down here," Croaker continued. "Well, we'll show you around the rest of the department - but how about some tea first while we get to know each other a little better? I think I can hear the kettle whistling."

"I'd lo-"

"He's always making tea," Avery interrupted apologetically, stepping forward from behind Beth's back to take her arm firmly in his own. "Come on, Beth, I'll show you around while the old man's tea boils." He bent his lips close to Beth's ear - his breath was hot and tinged with a faintly-unpleasant smell - and lowered his voice to a still-very-audible whisper. "He walks too slowly for us, anyway, and the _lectures _he tries to give you...trust me, it's not worth the hassle. You in?"

"Er..." but beneath Avery's insistent gaze, Beth relented. "OK, I suppose."

"Great," said Avery, grinning. "Here, have you seen the Time-Turners?"

Beth was rather swept along in his path. She turned to try to flash Professor Croaker an apologetic glance, but saw that he had already turned away and was heading towards the open doorway at the far end of the Time Room on the right-hand side. Avery guided her in the opposite direction, back towards the tall glass cabinet that stood beside the bell jar on its plinth. Beth had quite forgotten about the cabinet in her fascination with the time-twisting jar, but now that she was closer and Avery drew her attention to it she saw that the little lumps of gold placed delicately within were in fact what looked like shattered and broken pocket-watches.

"Time-Turners?" she asked uncertainly, and Avery nodded. "What are they? You can't mean they really turn back-"

"Oh, yes. Or rather, they used to. Some bloody idiots managed to destroy the lot of them years and years ago." Avery rapped sharply on the glass. "These are your holy grail, Beth. Imagine it - a working Time-Turner. The things you could do. The money you could make! It would be one of the most prized artefacts on the planet. Can you believe they used to give these out to _Hogwarts students_?"

Beth opened her mouth to say that she had never attended Hogwarts, but Avery cut smoothly over her. "Even in America they've never cracked the secrets of time like our Unspeakables used to be able to," he said. "Like _you _will, I'm sure. Come on, I'll show you the rest of the department."

He steered Beth rather abruptly - she had been in the process of probing the smashed Time-Turners with her wand for remnants of magical energy - towards the closed door on the far left side of the Time Room. Through the room's other door - the one Croaker had disappeared through - Beth saw a small complex of offices and desks and precise sparkling laboratory equipment. There were five or six other Unspeakables in there, but Beth only saw inside for a moment before she was urged on by the burly dark-haired man behind her through the other door into a massive, gloomy hall, far larger than any she had seen so far.

Row after row of ceiling-high shelves stretched almost as far as she could see. Each shelf - and there were hundreds, reaching up twenty feet to the distant ceiling - was creaking beneath the weight of tens and tens of little misty-white orbs.

"This is the Hall of Prophecy," Avery announced as he led her down the first row. Beth gaped helplessly from side to side. Each orb was crystal. its contents murky, white and constantly shifting, and each was annotated with a neat little inscription. _Unknown to S.C., _one read. _L.G. and A.Q. _"It's pretty much what it says on the tin. If it's been predicted by a Seer anytime in the last few hundred years it's in here."

"Has anyone ever predicted the end of the world?" It was the first thing that had rose to mind.

"Loads of times. It never happens."

"Er - OK," Beth said as they rounded a corner at the end of Row Ninety-Six and headed for a chink of light away to their right; a doorway. "If I'm supposed to be working with time, who works in this room?"

Avery shrugged. "Croaker, I suppose," he said. "He's in charge of most of the department these days. The Brain Room's his real field of expertise, but he looks after here and the Space Chamber as well, keeps the experiments ticking over. Since Bobbin brought us back into the Ministry, me and him are pretty much the only real Unspeakables left."

"What about-"

"You saw a few interns back in the office; weirdos, mostly. Weasley tosses them our way 'cause he can't put them anywhere else, but they won't last long. There used to be a woman who worked in the Love Chamber a few years back - pretty thing, smart as well, I forget her name - but she disappeared. Had a mental breakdown or something like that."

"Oh." Beth wondered for a moment whether she should offer her apologies, but Avery seemed singularly unconcerned by his ex-coworker's situation, so she pressed on with her questions instead. "What happened to all the other Unspeakables, then?"

"Elizabeth Riddle killed most of them," Avery said. He flashed Beth a quick sidelong glance before he continued, but she just nodded insistently. "Back when she and her brother were trying to murder half the Ministry. When they attacked here and killed Granger they got even more of us. Croaker told me she came down herself into the department to root the Unspeakables out. The old man went through all of it. She took him prisoner, had him doing all sorts of stuff for her for six months. Utterly mental, she was. I've done a bit of research into her and her brother, actually. Some of the stuff they did..." Avery whistled softly. "Lucky I was doing research in Transylvania at the time, right?"

"Lucky," Beth agreed whole-heartedly, shuddering inwardly at the thought of all the tales she had heard about and read of the monstrous Riddles.

It had been all the wizarding newspapers had talked about for weeks and months - the murders, the attacks, the mass prison breakout - until one day it had all stopped. The _Daily Prophet _didn't come to Beth and Thomas in their poky London flat that day, or the next either. After a week Beth convinced her brother to investigate, to go down to the Leaky Cauldron with her and find out what had happened. They had found the pub dusty and deserted, and had hastily returned home, unsure if their brief flirtation with the wizarding world was over for good. Six months had passed before they heard further news.

After the Hall of Prophecy, Avery showed Beth all the other strange rooms the Department of Mysteries had to offer; the one with the planets, the chamber with the water-tank occupied by what she now knew were _brains_, the locked door in the entrance chamber that Beth could not open earlier (she could have sworn Avery winked at her when he told her it was called the Love Chamber) and all the others. Last of all was a room even stranger than all those before it, Beth thought.

"This is my field of expertise," Avery said, leading Beth forward onto the uppermost ring of crumbling black-stone steps. "Death."

The Death Chamber reminded Beth of the ancient Roman amphitheatres she had learnt about at Muggle primary school. Cavernous and gloomy, the entrance was a slit high up in the stone wall. Rings of steps, growing ever smaller, cascaded downwards to a wide, deep pit in the stone floor a hundred feet below. Stairs led down into the pit, and an ancient stone archway, ten foot tall, stood there. Beneath it was what looked from here like a dirty black curtain, drifting slowly back and forth in a draught. There was a white-haired man in a white lab-coat perched on the pit wall below.

"Professor Croaker!" Avery called, surprised. His deep, booming voice echoed resoundingly off the walls. Far below, old Professor Croaker turned away from regarding the black curtain to nod in greeting. "What are you doing here?"

"I thought I might finish Beth's tour personally," Croaker said mildly as Avery and Beth started down the steps towards him. "That is, if you can bear to be parted from her no doubt delightful company for a short while, Charles."

"I - of course," Avery replied with a not-quite-grin. He turned aside to Beth. "Well, I can see our dear professor wants to talk to you alone. Anything else you want to ask me, Beth?"

Beth stared up into his twinkling dark-hazel eyes. "How did you end up studying death?"

Avery smirked. "It fascinates me."

Relinquishing his grip on Beth's arm, he turned away to head back up the steps, and she turned away - and suddenly something crunched loudly underneath Beth's foot. She stumbled, and almost fell down into the remaining six rows of stairs. Avery had to wrap a thick warm arm around her waist to set her back on her feet. "Easy there!" he said, spinning her to face him with another relentless smile. "You OK? Can you make it down the rest of the steps?"

Beth nodded, though her face was flushing furiously again. When Avery was gone - off to get some lunch, he said, inviting Beth to join him as soon as she was done with 'the old man' - she knelt to peer at what she had trodden on. "What's this?" she wondered to Professor Croaker, rising with a pair of shattered black sunglasses in her hands. "How did these get here?"

Descending the last few steps, she held them towards the professor, who regarded them thoughtfully from behind his thick-rimmed spectacles. "I've no idea," he admitted. "I must have missed them on my way in. Perhaps one of the new interns, though I must confess I haven't seen any of them wearing sunglasses..."

"Perhaps they were spontaneously magically created," Beth suggested.

"That's impossible. Every third-year Transfiguration student knows that Einstein's theory of magical relativity prohibits-"

"Einstein's theory is very flawed," she blurted out. Beth hesitated a moment - almost surprised by her own daring - but Professor Croaker merely blinked, and then nodded encouragingly for her to continue. Taking a seat on the pit wall opposite the softly-shifting curtain, Beth took a deep breath. "Well, _I _think..."

For almost an hour they talked happily about all sorts of magical theory. It was wonderful. Beth's brother Thomas had never had any interest in this sort of thing, and she had never known any other wizards or witches beside him. To finally _talk _about all the things that had been buzzing around in her mind for so long, all the half-formed ideas, all the theories, every tiny titbit of knowledge she had picked up from second-hand textbooks and her father's occasional letter and her own small experiments; it was just wonderful.

Finally, when Beth had finished elucidating her thoughts on the first three supposed exceptions to Gamp's Law - and why they weren't really exceptions at all - she paused, and took a breath for what felt like the first time in days. Looking rather taken aback, Croaker offered a wrinkled old hand to her.

"Welcome to the department," he said as Beth shook it. "I'm positive you'll do magnificently here, Beth." She beamed in thanks, and a moment later Croaker pressed the smashed sunglasses into her hands. "Why don't you take these? Whatever the reason a pair of rather unfashionable sunglasses manifested themselves on the floor of the Death Chamber, I'm sure you'll figure it out one day."

With that, he left her by the fluttering curtain. As Beth smiled to herself, delighted with what had just occurred, and gazed thoughtfully down at the pair of sunglasses in her hands, she thought for a moment she heard whispers from beyond the archway - and a shiver ran down her spine as she had the strangest, strongest feeling that she had forgotten something very important.


	11. Daydreams - pt3

_Daydreams - part 3_

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><p>"They're creatures," said Potter, turning away from the sea and the distant Isle of Drear towards the warming blue flames Tom had conjured a few minutes earlier. The forty-nine year-old man conjured a flimsy camp-chair by the fire, sank into it, then nodded for Hugo, Albus and Tom to do the same. It was early morning, and bitterly cold. In the low eastern sky, the sun was threatening to break through the clouds. "Big, red and hairy. Five legs, long snout, sharp teeth...very dangerous."<p>

He nodded over Tom's shoulder towards the small, stony Isle of Drear. "Normally, the Ministry keeps them safely penned up on the island over there. Obviously, over the last year we've had other priorities, so the Quintapeds have been pretty much left to do whatever they want. From what we've been able to figure out, they've been getting more and more daring. Some have even been swimming over to the mainland." Potter grimaced. "Two Muggle hikers have been eaten."

Tom started. "_Eaten?_"

Grimly, Potter nodded, and almost in unison Tom and Hugo Weasley turned to view the island across the water with a certain new-found respect - and, Tom admitted privately, to make sure some monstrous five-legged creature wasn't emerging from the waves to devour them. "We're going over there?" Hugo asked, and Potter nodded again. "Er - what's the plan, Uncle Harry?"

Reaching into his robes, Potter pulled out a map of the Isle of Drear and unfolded it upon the pebbles. Potter prodded the map with the tip of his wand to triple it in size, then indicated two points on the island's eastern, mainland-facing beach; a cave, almost hidden among jutting rocks and cliffs, and a sandy hilltop that Tom could make out from here.

"Here's where Lily says Quintapeds have been sighted," Potter said. "They used to stay inland and never go near the beach but, like I said, they're getting braver. It's probably these ones that've been swimming over to the mainland. They're fiercely territorial, apparently, so they should still be in the area."

"So we find them and do what, exactly?" Tom asked. "Kill them all?"

"We're not here to kill them," Potter said, "not if we can avoid it. They're just animals, Thomas. We just want to make sure they can't hurt anyone else. We'll head over there to the island, chase the Quintapeds out of their lairs on the beach and move them further inland. Afterwards we'll re-secure the island so they can't get out." He tapped a scroll of parchment dangling from his belt. "Simple protective charm. Everyone happy?"

Chasing the Quintapeds out of their lairs non-lethally sounded more easier said than done, Tom thought privately, but he just nodded. Albus did too. Potter glanced sideways at Hugo, who looked as if he'd be happier staying and sitting by the fire than exploring freezing cold subterranean caves in search of five-legged monsters, but eventually Hugo too signalled his agreement. Soon after, Tom extinguished his flames, and then all four wizards Apparated the few hundred feet across the water to the Isle of Drear. They reappeared on a stony, windswept beach much like the one they had just left. There was no sign of hairy red monsters, but Tom kept his wand firmly in hand - just in case.

Potter split the quartet into two, then gave them their instructions. Tom and Albus - drawing the short straw, Tom felt - were to investigate the cave, some four hundred yards further away down the beach. Potter and Hugo would scope out the tall hilltop rising high behind them. With that, they parted. Tom and Albus moved away down the beach, wands held warily at their sides, talking together in low voices as they went. Since Tom didn't know, Albus told him the story of the Quintapeds - or as some called them, the Hairy MacBoons.

There were once two warring clans, Albus said, on this island; the McCliverts and the MacBoons. Or so the story in _Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them _went, anyway. One day the clan-chief of the MacBoons killed the chief of the McCliverts in a drunken duel. Naturally, the McCliverts retaliated by transforming the MacBoons into monsters. They didn't realise until afterwards that the five-legged creatures they had created - Quintapeds - were far more unpleasant neighbours than the MacBoons had been. The Quintapeds killed every single one of the McCliverts and, as legend had it, had resisted all Ministry attempts to Untransfigure them ever since.

Aside from that story, Albus seemed determined to involve the (even as a child, never particularly chatty) Tom in small talk. His wife, his children, what was happening at the Ministry, how his sister was handling her position, how Tom was finding his new job...it was almost a relief when the mouth of the cave they were to investigate came into view and Albus raised a finger to his lips. Towering above them were jagged five hundred foot-tall cliffs. Tom and Albus stood at the mouth of a gaping fifty-foot-wide hole in the rock. Albus led the way as, ducking their heads beneath the lip of the cave's mouth, they stepped inside.

Their wands cast a warm white light across their path, and Tom could see that the cave sloped gently downwards and to the left for quite some way. After only a couple of minutes of walking, the walls and ceiling of the cave pressed claustrophobically close - though that was nothing to Tom. He had grown up in a place like this, after all. "So how are we supposed to clear these things out of here, then?" he asked as they walked. "Assuming we even find them, that is."

"Bangs and smoke," said Albus. "Stinging Jinxes. Teleportation, transfiguration, charms, curses. Be creative, Thomas. I'm sure that's what Lily would want."

Several minutes passed. Were those skittering footsteps in the distant darkness, or just the steady _drip-drip-drip _of an underground river? Was that wet patch Tom had just trodden on condensation, or the fresh leavings of a five-legged man-eating monster? Were the glittering pinpricks of light all around the two wizards just precious minerals and gemstones reflected in the glare of the wandlight, or the menacing eyes of a Quintaped?

Reflexively, Tom stabbed his wand forwards and sent an eye-searingly bright ball of light spinning down through the cave, but it revealed nothing more than more endless stone, more stalactities, more stalagmites, and the long winding path downwards and on. And so they kept moving. _Homenum Revelio! _he thought hopefully, raising his wand again. Perhaps if these things _were _Transfigured humans as the story went, his charm would reveal them. It didn't, though, and now, as the cave floor began to suddenly level out, the footsteps were growing louder.

A cool draft buffeted Tom in the face. He swung his wand in that direction, and saw a darkened opening in the cave wall to his right. From beyond the opening came odd skittering, thumping sounds and angry snarls. This definitely wasn't water. Tom glanced over his shoulder, to where twenty feet away Albus was inspecting a stagnant pool of murky-green water thoughtfully. "Er - Albus," he called as, cautiously, he approached the opening and raised his wand to chase away the darkness, "I think-"

But Tom froze. In the light of his raised wand, two pairs of lidless yellow eyes were gleaming back at him from beyond the opening. He took a hasty step backwards - and then with a bone-chilling snarl two massive black shapes leapt from the darkness towards him. "_AVADA KEDAVRA!_" he yelled instinctively._  
><em>

In the blinding flash of green light, he saw them properly for the first time; two of them, massive and bulging with muscle, covered in shaggy red fur, mouths overflowing with carnivorous teeth. His Killing Curse caught one in its ugly face, blasting it against the cave wall beside the opening; the stone beneath Tom's feet shook with the impact, and the Quintaped slid to the floor and didn't move. This all happened in the briefest instant, and meanwhile the other Quintaped was lunging for Tom's throat. "_AVADA_-"

"_IMPEDIMENTA!_" Albus yelled. _  
><em>

The monster's teeth snapped shut an inch from Tom's neck - and then it was gone, blasted back through the opening in the cave wall into what Tom saw now was a larger cavern, perhaps a hundred feet wide and twice as tall. Far above was the faintest glimmer of daylight. Tom made to follow and finish the Quintaped off - but then, with a clatter of footsteps, Albus appeared at Tom's side and seized his arm. He was looking at Tom in a whole new light. "You used the Killing Curse," he said.

"It was about to _eat _me!"

"That's Dark magic, Thomas," Albus said. "Illegal magic. Where did you learn that?"

"Me and my sister taught ourselves magic," Tom lied easily. "We didn't know the rules. We didn't know there were things you weren't _supposed _to do. If I've done something wrong, I'm sorry - but is that _really _the priority right now?"

"No. Come on."

Releasing his grip on Tom, Albus hurried through the hole after the Quintaped he had cursed, and Tom followed, sending another brilliant ball of light ahead of him as he ran. It lit up the gloomy cavern like a floodlight. The Quintaped Albus had blasted had fallen fifteen feet away, but was now returning to its five inverted oddly-shaped feet. Behind it was another of the creatures, much smaller, its fur a lighter red verging on blonde; the smaller Quintaped was making an odd braying noise that sounded almost frightened, and it was hopping uncertainly from leg to leg to leg as it waited for the larger Quintaped to regain its feet.

"Remember, we're not supposed to kill them," warned Albus.

"Do we have a _choice_?"

The larger Quintaped, seeing its compatriot's fear, growled, and stomping its five feet thunderously it charged across the cavern floor towards Tom. Albus sent another Impediment Jinx towards the creature, and another, but this time they just bounced off the Quintaped's thick hide. As it closed to within five feet, drooling and snarling, Tom lowered his wand calmly towards the creature's twisted face. He _could _stop it without killing it, he thought - but he didn't particularly want to. For a moment the green flash of the Killing Curse was reflected in the the creature's manic eyes - and then it crashed to the floor, and Tom was stepping over its body to advance on the last Quintaped.

"Don't kill it!" Albus exclaimed urgently, hurrying forward after Tom. The little Quintaped seemed almost afraid to attack; it took two steps forward now, then another back, and then scurried quickly to the side as if searching for a way out, all the while making that curious panicked braying noise.

"I won't," said Tom. Lightning-quick he turned and swung his wand towards Albus. "_Obliviate!_"

Well, that took care of his Killing Curse problem. Also, as Tom wasn't dead right now, his Unbreakable Vow to Lily didn't stretch to cover Memory Charms. Good to know. As Albus blinked confusedly, Tom turned back to the creature before him. Head tilted curiously to the side, he flicked his wand, and with a loud blast the Quintaped flew ten feet through the air to smash against the rear wall of the cavern. It squealed loudly in pain, an oddly human sound. Tom kept his wand raised, keeping the Quintaped pinned there, helpless, as he approached.

"What are you, then?" he murmured, closing to within a yard or two with a few quick steps to inspect the creature. Its legs were waving frantically as it struggled to free itself from Tom's invisible grip. Its lidless yellow eyes were wide with terror. It was obviously a child; its teeth weren't even fully formed yet.

"Let it go, Thomas," Albus called from behind him, having evidently regained his faculties. "That's cruel."

"I won't hurt it," Tom said. "I think I can...I've got a feeling..."

Tentatively, he reached out a hand towards the creature. Not to touch it, but to probe it for enchantments and traces of magic. His fingertips moved forwards an inch, another, another - and then he felt that familiar crackle of magical energy in his fingertips. "A-ha," he whispered victoriously, suddenly smiling to himself for some reason. Before Albus could stop him Tom raised his wand and pressed it into the hard black skin of the creature's face.

Beneath his wand-tip the creature shuddered and screamed. "What are you doing?" Albus demanded, stepping forward - but Tom grabbed the black-haired man's arm and held him back. He watched eagerly as the little Quintaped fought even harder against his grip, battering holes in the wall it was pinned against with its fists yet still unable to escape. Its yellow eyes rolled back into its skull. Its teeth gnashed and gnawed at its own flesh, drawing putrid green blood. When it was over, something small, pale and trembling slumped to the stony floor.

In fascinated unison, Tom and Albus drew closer, and kneeling beside it Tom turned it over with a cold hand; its eyes were brown and wild.

It was a girl, tiny and feral. Utterly naked, she leapt up and slashed wildly at Tom's face with wicked overgrown fingernails, then wriggled past his flailing arms to sprint on all fours - stumbling awkwardly in a lilting, stilting manner as if unused to possessing only four limbs - towards the carcass of the fully-grown Quintaped Tom had killed moments earlier. Its thick black tongue was lolling unpleasantly from its gaping mouth, and toxic green blood was oozing from a gash in its soft underbelly where it must have torn itself on the cave's rough floor.

Frozen to the spot in utter astonishment, Albus too let her pass. The girl fell upon the Quintaped's hard, hairy back, then screamed - an animalistic, keening sound - as she realised the Quintaped was dead. Perhaps these were her parents, Tom thought, oddly calm considering what had just occurred. After all his promises to himself, all his moping and moaning and regrets, it hadn't even been a week before he orphaned another child. What a risible creature he was.

"How did you know?" asked Albus, stunned, as the girl continued to sob and cry.

Tom shrugged. "I had a hunch. The spell was simple enough to undo it."

"But - but that means..." Albus glanced over his shoulder at the girl and the dead Quintaped, then trailed a hand across his sweaty brow. "We _killed _two of them, Thomas. We have to go tell my dad that the Quintapeds are people. They might be-"

"We have to deal with her first," Tom interrupted pointedly.

Together, they turned back to the girl. Her hair was a dirty-blonde mane. In some places it was chewed and gnawed almost to the scalp. In others it fell in long greasy strips for two feet or more. She was perhaps ten or eleven, tiny and painfully skinny, and everywhere her skin was pockmarked with open sores and oozing claw-wounds. Suddenly very conscious of her nakedness, Tom started to avert his eyes - but then the girl, whimpering unintelligibly, lowered her head to lap at the Quintaped's still-bleeding wound.

As the monster's foul, stinking blood coated her tongue Tom opened his mouth to yell a warning - something told him touching that stuff would be a very bad idea - but it was already too late. The blonde-haired girl's sobbed screams suddenly shifted in frequency and intensity to a terrible frightened wail of pain. Acrid black smoke billowed from her mouth. The acidic blood was burning through her tongue and the soft flesh of her lips and cheeks. Frantically she scuttled away from the dead creature, arms and legs twitching and contorting violently, brown eyes manic. Tom and Albus exchanged a horrified glance.

"_Aguamenti_," Tom whispered, stunned numb. It was all he could think of. The jet of water hit the girl full in the face, snapping her head back violently, but to no avail. Lurching to her feet she took one wobbly step, then collapsed to her knees. Tears were flowing freely down her pale filthy cheeks now, and her teeth were gritted in agony - although the acidic blood was beginning to corrode through those too. "_Scourgify! Tergeo! Vulnera Sanentur!_"

None of it worked. Tom had never paid attention in first aid classes at Hogwarts, and he was woefully unprepared for this. Elizabeth or Lily would have known what to do, but not him. "Help her!" he exclaimed to Albus.

"I - I can't, I don't know...Dad will know something," Albus suddenly resolved. "I'll go get him."

As soon as that, he turned on the spot and vanished into thin air. At the same time, with one last desperate inarticulate cry the girl fell face down upon the stony floor, still twitching and flailing horribly. Hot crimson blood - her own - was pooling out rapidly from her hidden, brutalised face. Tom cursed loudly and reached into his jacket pocket. _Sod it, she's not dead yet. I know the rules. I can do it. _Eyes fixed helplessly on the little dying blonde-haired girl, Tom gave the silver Time-Turner his sister had built one sharp spin.

An hour later he was ready. As the tall man with mousy-brown hair gaped stupidly at the dying girl, then turned a little silver device between his fingers and disappeared, Tom stepped from the cavern's furthest impenetrable shadows. He had just taken a crash course in Healing.

Striding purposefully across the cavern, he swiped his wand towards the girl, and a great invisible hand yanked her roughly into the air and towards him. At the same time a set of clean white robes appeared from thin air and wove itself around the girl to spare her modesty. Her eyes fell shut and her bloody, twisted face relaxed into a picture of relative calm as Tom placed her into a painless unconsciousness.

With small precise motions of his wand - rather like stitching a thread - Tom drew the Quintaped's acidic blood from the girl. He repaired her scorched mouth, her lips, her seared tonsils and tongue, her teeth - even restoring a little white sparkle into the girl's yellowed fangs. The blood had scoured the lining of her gullet and stomach, so he repaired those too. Even the girl's own blood was contaminated with the acidic toxins, rotting through the lining of each artery and vein it surged through; that took slightly longer to fix. Finally he lowered his wand, and the girl gently to the floor with it.

Her skin was pink, new and perfect except for a matted tangle of white scars around the corners of her mouth; those, she would bear forever. All her wounds and sores and scratches were gone. Even her dirty-blonde hair wasn't quite as tangled a mess as it had previously been. A good job, all things considered, he thought happily. The girl's eyes opened, dazed and distant, and found Tom. Involuntarily he recoiled a step backwards from the fierceness he saw there - and then another as, growling and snarling like a rabid dog, she dashed across the cave clearing towards him.

She was running on all fours, her gait unbalanced and uneven. She looked for all the world as if she intended to rip Tom's throat out. She most likely _did_; she had lived her entire life so far as a five-legged man-eating monster, after all. She would almost certainly never be able to adjust to life as a human. The kindest thing to do would probably be to kill her now, or to leave her in this dark cave to fend for herself and most likely starve to death. In the heartbeat before the girl reached him, Tom decided he wouldn't do that. Instead, he did the only other thing he could think of; he conjured a six foot-tall mirror before him.

The girl froze in her tracks - head tilted curiously to the side, eyes wide and frantic, teeth bared. Still moving on all fours in her curious loping way, she crept a step closer to the reflective glass. Peering out from behind the mirror, Tom could almost see the cogs turning in her mind; she was no mindless animal, at least. She had some intelligence about her. Perhaps she did have a chance. Slowly, the girl's dark-brown eyes slid from her pale reflection to the hairy red Quintaped behind her. While she was looking elsewhere, Tom stepped out slowly from behind the mirror, hands raised in supplication.

"Hello," he said in soft, reassuring tones, making sure to keep a healthy distance from the girl - for her peace of mind rather than his own. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She saw him again and snarled, but didn't charge towards Tom this time. He knew she couldn't understand his words, no more than he could understand the Quintapeds' strange growling, but just the sight of him to the girl - pale-skinned, four-limbed, voice quiet and melodic instead of a harsh roar - seemed enough to trigger a dawn of understanding in her brown eyes. She stared suspiciously at Tom for several long moments, then looked away - at first to the dead Quintaped again, then to her own small pale hands.

She might be beyond saving, beyond any hope of a semblance of a normal human life - though somehow Tom didn't think so. There was a certain something in her eyes - a sly cleverness, a spirited nature and, yes, a dull hatred of Tom for murdering her parents - that told Tom the girl might be alright.

He wasn't sure why he was so happy with himself. The girl was unimportant. No one. Nothing more than a curiosity. In the grand scheme of Tom's life, all the evil things he had done versus the few good, saving this girl was little more than a footnote. Still, he felt positively buoyant. Closing the distance between them slowly, Tom held out a hand to the girl. She sniffed it uncertainly. _Okay, that was a bit optimistic. _Reaching down, Tom took a gentle hold of the girl's arm and, as her eyes met his in an acquiescent way he took to mean agreement, he drew the girl up onto her own two feet.

Suddenly Potter, Hugo and Albus appeared from thin air with a deafening _bang. _The instant she saw them the girl cried out in fear and ran - on two legs, Tom noticed approvingly, moving with nimble bare-footed leaps across the jagged floor. As Potter and the others blinked confusedly, she exited the cavern through the opening in the cave wall then disappeared into the darkness.

"I saved her," Tom said unnecessarily.

When they stepped outside the cave, a small blonde-headed figure was framed against the light. The girl was perched on the edge of the rocky seawall, staring out across the still grey waters of the bay towards the mainland, hands cupped to her mouth as she called and whooped nonsensical noises as if testing the limits of her new voice.

"Take her back to the Ministry, Thomas," said Potter, turning towards the cliffs and unfurling the roll of parchment he had clipped to his belt. "Albus, go with him. I doubt Lily'd believe him otherwise. We'll finish up here, set up the protective enchantments again. This Quintaped thing..." Potter sighed. "Well, that'll be for Lily to decide. Let's just try not to kill any more of them, OK? You did a good thing today though, Thomas, saving her. Albus made it sound like she had no chance. Well done."

"Does she talk?" asked Hugo.

"She growls," said Tom, shrugging. Privately he had in mind a charm that could help the girl learn English in a matter of moments; the same one that Voldemort had implanted in Tom himself. He'd figure out a way to explain _that _later, however. Now he just wanted to get off this island, and preferably go someplace warm. Interrupting the blonde-haired girl in mid-_whoop_, Tom took her arm. She stared up at him with big quizzical brown eyes. "You're about to Apparate," he warned her. "You're probably not going to like it."

Albus stood by Tom's other side. Together, the three of them vanished into thin air with a loud _pop. _


	12. Sugar and Spice

_Sugar and Spice_

* * *

><p>Lily was eating lunch with Niamh Finnigan in the Magical Law Enforcement canteen. Earlier today they had been at Azkaban, overseeing the removal of the last of Elizabeth Riddle's homegrown Inferi from the premises, and after that reconnoitring the tribe of giants that had taken up residence on the north face of Ben Nevis. They had counted over a hundred of the massive creatures. Lily hoped she could find a peaceful solution - she had already got in touch with Hagrid and Madame Maxime about arranging a meeting with the giants' Gurg - but nothing could be guaranteed where giants were concerned.<p>

After that they had returned to the Ministry, but their morning's work hadn't been over; twenty or so teenagers had had to be interviewed, assessed for competency and, if they passed Lily's stringent measures, allocated as understudies to more senior members of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. These were the Hogwarts students who, having just finished their seventh (or in a few cases sixth) years, had been invited by Minister Bobbin to seek their careers in the Ministry - without having to undergo the usual lengthy training procedures.

Lily had tried to make sure that every teenager was allocated to an experienced staff member who could watch carefully over them - some long-serving Aurors and Law Enforcement Patrol officers had two or three understudies each - but she had soon run out of experience. She'd have to find others to take on the few teenagers that were left.

All in all, it had been a busy morning. Now it was the early afternoon. The Magical Law Enforcement canteen - a long, low-roofed room with large (artificial) plate-glass windows outside of which it was a brilliantly-sunny day - was always relatively quiet at this time. Those who worked behind a desk had had their lunch and were (Lily hoped, at least) hard at work, while those who kept more irregular hours - Aurors, Patrol officers, Hit Wizards - would be either out of office on assignment work or at home getting some much-needed shut-eye right about now.

Lily and Niamh fell somewhere in between the two extremes. There was only so much planning, paperwork and employee management Lily could take before she wanted to get out and _do _something. Capturing the Welsh Green dragon that was terrorising the Lake District could wait another day or two, though; now, she and Niamh had paused for breath to eat their lunch. Lily was having an egg salad. Across the table in the near-empty canteen, Niamh was chewing on a turkey sandwich and idly browsing the pages of the latest _Witch Weekly. _

It was a '_Special Welcome Back!' _edition, apparently; the venerable magazine's first since returning to print a day or two ago. Emblazoned across its front cover was the only photograph of Tom and Elizabeth Riddle that had ever been taken - grainy and blurred, it had been snapped from long-distance while the murderous siblings lounged by a marble fountain in Trafalgar Square - along with a banner headline proclaiming that the Riddles were 'gone for good'.

The topic of discussion between Lily and Niamh fixed largely on the new employees that they had seen come in over the last few days; who they liked, who they didn't, who would make the cut, who would fail disastrously, that sort of thing. They lingered for a while on that slightly-strange Thomas boy, and the assignment Lily had sent him and her father, brother and cousin on today. She hadn't been in the department when they left, but Niamh had, and had seen them off as they left on their way to sort out the Quintaped issue. They still weren't back.

Niamh thought Thomas had seemed nice. Lily wasn't so sure. She had found herself thinking back to the way the brown-haired man's incessant smiles had never quite spread to the depths of his eyes - and how those eyes had so quickly turned cold and calculating when Lily challenged him on his past. Voicing those thoughts would have made her seem more than a touch paranoid, though, so Lily simply said she thought he had been a bit full of himself.

"Maybe," Niamh conceded with a slight, sly smile. "Cute, though." Lily, in mid-sip of her glass of water, spluttered, and the dark-haired woman laughed lightly. "Oh, he _is._"

"I can't say I'd noticed," Lily said aloofly.

"Yeah, but you wouldn't notice if Merlin himself came back from the dead and asked you out for dinner, Lily."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Well, when was the last time you dated?"

Lily rolled her eyes. "A long, long, long time ago."

"When?" Niamh prodded insistently. "Who? It wasn't _Roger_, surely-"

"It doesn't matter!" Lily said heatedly. "My life has been a big jumbled mess for about a thousand years, I _know_ that. What else do you want me to say? Hmmm, let me think - did I last go on a date before _or _after my brother, aunt and cousin were murdered?"

"Alright, calm down," Niamh sighed, setting her magazine aside to glance at her wristwatch. "He _is _cute, though. Anyway, I'd better go. Got to meet what's-his-name from Misuse of Muggle Artefacts for - well, something or other. Toodles."

"See you later," Lily said as Niamh left. The dark-haired woman left half a turkey sandwich and her copy of _Witch Weekly _behind. Lily reached for the magazine. She had been browsing idly through its pages for only ten minutes when suddenly three figures appeared from thin air behind her with a deafening _pop._ "How many times have I told you," she groaned, twisting in her seat to face the offenders, "no _Apparating in the office_-"

But the chastisement died on her lips when she saw who stood there. Her brother Albus and brown-haired Thomas Gaunt were the culprits who had so surprised her. Both were shivering and damp, their dark black robes scuffed with dirt and seaspray - and behind _them _was a girl. She was tiny and malnourished, and upon Apparating had fallen to her knees to grasp at her neck with both pale hands. She was taking deep, panting breaths, a panicked sound more animal than human, and her eyes were wide and fearful. As, gradually, she calmed, the girl glanced frantically around the interior of the canteen, her expression as bewildered as if she had just landed upon some alien planet.

"Told you so," Thomas said fondly to her, half-stooping to help - or rather, urge - the girl back to her two bare feet. As she stood, blinking rapidly, big brown eyes watering in the sudden bright light, the girl seemed to realise she was in no further danger of asphyxiation, and her hands returned to her sides. Her fingernails were filthy and unkempt, Lily noticed. When the girl for the first time noticed Lily's curious gaze, she retreated timidly behind the hem of Thomas's robes. She was still glancing around the canteen as if she had never seen its like before. She looked as confused as Lily might if she were suddenly plonked down onto the surface of the moon. "Her first Disapparition," Thomas explained to Lily.

Lily was rather confused, but her manners took over, and stepping past Thomas she went to one knee to meet the strange girl's panicked eyes. "Hello there," Lily said kindly. "What's your name?"

The girl just stared unblinkingly back at her. Her hair was short, ragged and greasy, but beneath the mud and blood and grime it might have been blonde. Her face, too, was filthy, her features nervous and twitchy, and fresh white scars tangled unpleasantly around the corners of her bloodless lips. Her eyes were big and brown, and betrayed a certain terrified intelligence. Curiously, she wore a fluffy-white bathrobe - all she wore - but that too was stained with mud and bright-crimson blood. When Lily inched towards her, the girl's lips bared slightly to reveal two rows of small, sharp yellowed teeth.

Returning to her feet, Lily flashed a quizzical glance at her brother. "Who's she?" she asked in a low voice. "Where's Dad?"

"Dad's fine," Albus said. "It's a long story-"

But Albus was interrupted by the soft _whoosh _of an inter-departmental memo dropping from thin air into his lap. Curious, he unfolded the little paper aeroplane and read the message. An owl must have arrived for her brother while he was out, Lily supposed, and he was only getting the message now that he had returned. "Albus-"

"It's a long story," he repeated, "and one I'm going to have to leave Thomas to explain. Sorry," he added quickly to the brown-haired man he had arrived with, "but my family's coming back from Switzerland today. Right now, in fact. You understand? Good luck!"

As soon as that - and with a happy smile - he turned and Disapparated. "No Apparating in the office!" Lily yelled after him. Sighing, she sank back into her chair and motioned for Thomas and the strange dirty-blonde-haired girl to do the same. "Fancy explaining what the hell's going on?" she prompted.

Thomas hesitated, though, flashing a pointed glance at the canteen's few other patrons. All were goggling unabashedly at the little frightened girl and the man she had arrived with. "Your office?" he suggested.

"Er - sure." It was probably a good idea, Lily supposed. She couldn't account for everyone in the canteen's trustworthiness, and press hysteria had made monsters of mysterious children before. "I'll just get - er-" she jerked her head towards the little blonde girl by Thomas' side, now chewing violently at her overlong fingernails- "our little friend here something to eat. She looks starving. Just wait here a second while-"

"No need," Thomas interrupted. "I doubt she's picky." Leaning forward towards the table at which Lily still sat, he picked up Niamh's half-eaten turkey sandwich and offered it to the girl. She sniffed dubiously at it for a moment, then grabbed it eagerly with both hands and began tearing long strips of meat and bread off with her teeth. "Shall we?"

Lily (still utterly baffled), Thomas and the obviously-starving girl retreated to the sanctum of Lily's office. He led the girl to the battered old armchair in the corner of the office - the girl looked as puzzled as Lily felt when shown to the chair, and had to be physically placed into it and restrained by Thomas with a firm hand on her shoulder - and then perched on the arm of the chair himself. Lily looked at him expectantly, and then Thomas began to explain what had transpired on the Isle of Drear.

He and Albus had gone into a cave to investigate sightings of Quintapeds. They found the creatures, and inadvertently killed two - one dying in a cave-in, while the other fell and impaled itself upon a stalactite when Albus blasted it with an Impediment Jinx. The last of the Quintapeds had been a child, and together Albus and Thomas had cornered it in a cave clearing. Then, Thomas had claimed he had an idea, and stepping forward he had pressed his wand into the creature's face, and then...

Lily listened raptly, disbelieving at first - and then steadily, as Thomas' tale grew taller and taller, more and more so. "You mean," she said skeptically, "you're trying to say that that little girl _used to be_-"

"Yep."

"Bullsh-"

"It's true," he said, and there was something in his cold blue eyes then that made Lily suddenly believe him - though, as it turned out, her faith wasn't necessary. "Watch."

The very next moment, Thomas touched the tip of his holly-wood wand to his scalp, and when he removed it a thin tendril of silvery goop came away with it. He twitched his wand in a small, delicate movement, and the goop resolved into a vaguely-round silver cloud that zoomed towards Lily's desk, then hovered shimmeringly in the air above her. She craned her neck curiously to gaze up at it. A second later the cloud of goop resolved into three familiar shapes; two men in dark robes, and retreating quickly before them a little five-legged creature.

Everything unfolded as Thomas said it did. As Albus stood back, Thomas pinned the Quintaped to the wall with a flick of his wand - an impressive display of magic, Lily didn't fail to note - then stretched out a hand towards it. "What were you doing?" she asked.

"Seeing if she had any magic in her," he said. "Watch."

She watched as the brown-haired man pressed his wand into the creature's face. The goop was silent, but the obvious scream of pain and terror from the little Quintaped made Lily wince. It writhed and contorted in Thomas' memories for an uncomfortably long period of time. Lily didn't dare blink. Finally, the Quintaped fell to the stony floor, and when it rose it rose as a small, pale naked girl - the same one who sat in the corner of Lily's office now, if considerably more ragged and wild then.

"How did you do it?" Lily asked as Thomas waved his wand and the goop dissipated into nothingness.

He just shrugged. "Complicated magical stuff."

"Try me."

He tried. Five minutes later, Lily still had no idea what he was on about. Finally, the brown-haired man sighed in defeat and shrugged again. "My sister would understand."

After that, while the girl worked her way through her turkey sandwich, her fingernails and a few mints Lily had in her topmost desk drawer, they discussed their Quintaped problem. Both agreed this was something they had to be very careful with. The girl was one thing, but adult Quintapeds were ferocious killers. They _ate_ people. Lily couldn't just have Thomas change them back into people then set them loose in the world. "We need - oh, I don't know, a rehab program or something..."

Thomas smiled slightly. The blonde-haired girl was chewing affectionately on the sleeve of his robes. "What - 'stop being a man-eating monster in ninety days, or your money back'?"

Lily wiped an exasperated hand across her brow. "This is _not _a problem I needed. I-"

She was interrupted by a sudden commotion from across the room, where the girl had decided to sink her incisors into the back of Thomas' hand. "No!" he snapped, breaking off a stream of loud curses to stab a finger at her - rather as if he were a master chastising a naughty dog. "That's _bad." _

The girl's only reply was to make a strange half-growling, half-whistling noise at him - and then giggle delightedly at the sound she had managed to make with her new human tongue. Despite himself, Thomas smiled, and so did Lily. "Do you think she's house-trained?" she asked wryly.

Wincing, Thomas held his chewed hand up to the light to examine the damage. "I just hope she doesn't have rabies."

He divided the next few minutes between working to remove the teethmarks from the back of his hand, trying to convince the girl that biting was wrong, and demanding that Lily stop laughing at the little girl's utter disregard for his instruction.

"Anyway," he said finally, hand restored to normal and, he hoped, safe from the girl's yellowed teeth for now, "realistically, what are we supposed to do with _her_? She thinks she's an animal, for god's sake. She can't speak, she can't understand a word we say, she's lived her entire life on a deserted island-"

"She bites stuff," Lily interjected.

"She bites stuff," he agreed, "she prefers walking on all fours, she gets scared by loud noises and cars and wooden floors...even if we _could _teach her how to be a human, how long would it take? Years, probably. I mean, I'd happily look after her, but realistically she needs twenty-four hour professional care, and I can't give her that. I'll have a job. An unpredictable, demanding job." Lily gave him a funny look. "Er - if you choose to employ me, that is. She's a clever girl," he continued relentlessly. "She's already improved massively. I _know _I could stop her biting people-"

"You, you mean. She doesn't bite _me._"

"I could stop her biting _people_, start teaching her English - it'll only be a few weeks before she goes off to Hogwarts, anyway-"

"_Hogwarts?_" Lily repeated incredulously. "She can't go to Hogwarts!"

"She's magical, and she's of age. Roughly. Why not?"

"Er - because of all those things you just said? She needs constant teaching, constant care. You can't give her that, and Hogwarts certainly can't - but I know somewhere that might," she added suddenly on an impulse.

"Where?"

The issue of _Witch Weekly _Niamh, and then Lily had been reading lay open on Lily's desk; she had brought it back from the canteen and completely forgotten about it until now. Seizing it up, she levitated it across the room towards Tom, open at page twenty-two. "It's a place in Hogsmeade," she explained. "There's a feature in there about it. It's an orphanage specialising in - er, _special _cases. For children who need extra help. It looks nice, doesn't it?"

Thomas made a face. "An orphanage? Particularly this one..."

"You know it?" she asked curiously.

"I read a feature on Tom Riddle in the _Daily Prophet _once," he explained, waving one of the photos in _Witch Weekly _towards Lily. It depicted a bleak, grey building - the orphanage in question. "He hated it there. You can't seriously want to dump her in some crummy orphanage!"

"Oh, don't be so dramatic," Lily scolded. "I'm sure it's changed since then. Come on - we can at least go and see, can't we?" Without waiting for a reply, she rose to her feet and crossed the office towards the brown-haired man and the blonde-haired girl. She gave the latter a reassuring smile, and offered her her hand to help her to her feet. The girl sniffed it in an animalistic, probing sort of way, then took it - with a sideways glance at Thomas, who nodded approvingly as if the girl had just performed a particularly good trick. Lily half-expected Thomas to offer her a treat in reward.

"Oh, fine," he sighed, taking Lily's other hand. Lily made sure she had a firm grip of the blonde-haired girl, and then together they Disapparated. A moment later they reappeared under a cold white sky. It was drizzling. The three stood on the bleak, grey front steps of a bleak, grey building. On Lily's right, the girl was grimacing from the experience of Apparition, but she was certainly taking it far better this time. On Lily's left, Thomas was scowling.

"It certainly looks the same," he said.

"Let's get inside," said Lily, starting up the steps hand-in-hand with the little blonde-haired girl - still dressed in her bathrobe, of course. Thomas trailed along a few steps behind.

The orphanage's thick wooden doors drew automatically open as they approached. Inside, the first thing Lily saw was a familiar face - a portrait of the old matron that used to run this place, stern, grey-haired and still scowling. Thankfully she was sleeping at this moment in time, otherwise Lily felt sure the matron would have a few choice remarks to say about the girl beside her. _Evil old cow. _Lily had tried to visit Tom in the summer once, when she was thirteen or so, but the matron had stopped her at the door and turned her away. Tom wasn't permitted visitors, she had said then.

Thomas noticed the portrait too. When he stepped out of the rain, glanced casually to his left and saw the life-sized old woman snoozing there, he almost jumped out of his skin. Lily raised a questioning eyebrow. "Er - she reminds me of my grandmother," he explained hastily.

"Uh-huh. Remind me to never meet your grandmother."

"Oh, she's dead."

"Uh-huh."

Turning away, Lily moved into the warmth of the waiting-room. It was clean, airy and modern in here - a far cry from how it had looked when Harry Potter had first brought Tom Riddle this way thirteen years ago now. Lily approached the desk, where a kindly-looking nurse in her late twenties was waiting patiently. Her name-tag read Sarah. "Er - one child, please," said Lily. She wasn't entirely sure how this process worked.

"Hey! I thought we were just checking the place out," Thomas protested beside her.

"Have you got any better ideas?" Lily hissed quietly in his ear, before turning back to the nurse and smiling politely. "Sorry about him."

"Not at all." The nurse Sarah glanced down over the lip of her desk towards the little blonde-haired girl, and gave the girl a kind smile which she returned uncertainly. "Hi there," the nurse said before returning her attention to Lily. "Judging by the fact the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement is here during work hours, shall I assume this is a special case?"

"Very special."

It took a long, long time to explain the girl's circumstances - and an even longer time to fill out the requisite paperwork. "Er - what's her name?" the nurse asked at one point, pen poised in hand.

Lily and Thomas exchanged a bemused glance. "If we were being cruel we could call her Quinn," he offered.

Snorting amusedly, Lily glanced down at the girl - now seated on the floor staring puzzledly at a years-old edition of _Which Broomstick! _"How about it?" she asked her. "Quinn?" The blonde-haired girl growled. "Kate?" Growl. "Tina?" Growl. "Er...Annie?"

She licked Lily's hand at that. "Gross," Lily commented, turning back to the nurse. "I suppose I'll take that for agreement. She's Annie Quinn."

Afterwards, the nurse gave them the tour, then led the trio to what would be the blonde-haired girl's - Annie's - room. The girl Annie would be sharing with was already inside, writing thoughtfully in a diary at a desk when the nurse pushed the door open. She was pretty, brown-haired, impeccably-dressed in a crisp blue knee-length dress and a long pair of patterned white-and-yellow socks. She looked about the same age as Annie. "Hello, Lucy," said the nurse, leading the others forward into the room. "This is Annie. She'll be staying with you from now on. She's going to need a lot of help, so I want you to take care of her, OK?"

"Hello," Lucy said politely, turning away from her desk to rise to her full (diminutive) height. The bedroom was small, but cosy and thoughtfully-planned, and it had everything a child could reasonably wish for. It was dominated by a narrow set of bunkbeds (Lucy had already claimed the top bunk), the writing-desk littered with Lucy's bits and pieces, and a large, airy window beside which stood a tall chest of drawers. Lucy glanced next at Thomas. "Hello, Tom," she said.

Lily turned to inquire if Thomas and this Lucy girl knew each other somehow - with their mousy-brown hair, blue eyes and fair skin, they looked as if they might be related - but when she saw Thomas start in surprise, she realised he was as taken aback as she was. "How did you know my name?" he asked of the brown-haired girl.

Smiling sweetly, Lucy shrugged. "Just a guess. I like guessing games." Her blue eyes turned on Lily. "I'll do you too - Alexandra?"

"No, I'm Lily."

"Oh. See, I'm not very good."

In what felt like no time at all, Lily and Thomas were saying their goodbyes to the strange girl they had named Annie. Throughout it all the blonde-haired girl just blinked confusedly with those big brown eyes of hers. She was still staring at Thomas and Lily when the bedroom door swung shut. Afterwards, the two stepped outside into the rain.

"She'll be fine, Thomas," Lily reassured the brown-haired man beside her, who still looked faintly unconvinced by the orphanage. "We'll visit her. A lot. We'll make sure she's OK. Deal?"

"Deal," he reluctantly agreed.

"Good. By the way," she said, voice lightening, "by all accounts you did well today on your assignment. Well enough, anyway. I suppose you've got a job. We can sort out the finer details like pay and stuff later. Right now, there's two more boxes I need to tick."

"What are they?"

"Well, firstly, I need you to swear an Unbreakable Vow never to tamper with anyone's memory ever again."

"Oh. That."

"Thomas-"

"Sure, I'll do it. Just say the word."

"Good," said Lily. "Once we're back at the Ministry we'll get that done. Anyway, next thing. You know that we've been taking on teenagers straight out of Hogwarts, right? You've read about that?"

"Yeah."

"Well, the problem is that in the end, they're just teenagers. They're nowhere near ready for what I'm asking them to do. What Bobbin _demands _they do. They need good people to guide them, train them, teach them. Experienced people. People like you." _Even if you are a bit strange_, she added silently.

Thomas looked reluctant. "Do you really think-"

"I do - although I don't have much of a choice," she admitted. "You'll be fine, Thomas. Just remember, if they start giving you cheek you're legally allowed to hit them. On board?"

"I suppose." He looked even less happy at the thought of taking on an apprentice than the prospect of swearing an Unbreakable Vow. "Do I get to pick who?"

"I've got someone in mind, actually," Lily said. "You'll get your badge, your teenager and your free tickets to the National Wizarding Museum tomorrow."

"Who?" he asked again.

She told him.

Thomas grimaced. "You're kidding."

Lily found herself grinning. "You've met her?"

"Er - no. What sort of a name is _Daisy Greengrass_, though?"

* * *

><p><strong>I'm going to take a little break from uploading to build up a surplus of chapters again, but DOTDL will be back soon.<strong>


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